Although research has made significant advances in identifying treatments for fear-related disorders, these treatments are not entirely effective and relief from symptoms is often short-lived (Craske, 1999; McNally, 2007; Rachman, 1989). The research on which these treatments are based has largely focused on investigating processes by which fears are learned with an eye toward enhancing fear extinction. Less work, however, has examined safety stimuli (which denote the absence of threat) and whether specific types of safety stimuli have beneficial effects on fear extinction. One prevailing view is that safety signals are detrimental to the fear extinction process (Craske et al., 2008; Hermans, Craske, Mineka, & Lovibond, 2006), even though only a handful of studies using simplistic safety signals have tested these effects in humans (Lovibond, Davis, & O'Flaherty, 2000). Although there has been some discussion of the potential benefits of safety behaviors during exposure therapy (Rachman, Radomsky, & Shafran, 2008), protocols for the treatment of fear-related disorders generally warn against the presence of safety signals during therapy, including social-support figures even though their safety role had not been formally tested. However, recent findings suggest that this thinking may be misguided (Hornstein, Fanselow, & Eisenberger, 2016). Here, we examined whether one unique type of safety signal-social-support stimuli-can actually enhance fear extinction and whether these effects remain over time. The most common and effective method of treatment for maladaptive fears is exposure therapy, a procedure based on fear extinction processes. Yet fear extinction procedures in general, and exposure therapies in particular, are not always successful; fear reduction is often only temporary (

Visual information is imperative when developing a concrete and context-sensitive understanding of how music performance is perceived. Recent studies highlight natural, automatic, and nonconscious dependence on visual cues that ultimately refer to body expressions observed in the musician. The current study investigated how the social context of a performing musician (eg playing alone or within an ensemble) and the musical expertise of the perceivers influence the strategies used to understand and decode the visual features of music performance. Results revealed that both perceiver groups, nonmusicians and musicians, have a higher sensitivity towards gaze information; therefore, an impoverished stimulus such as a point-light display is insufficient to understand the social context in which the musician is performing. Implications for these findings are discussed.

This study explores a unique experimental protocol that evaluates how a musician's sensitivity to social context during performance can be analysed through a combination of behavioral analysis, self-report and Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE). An original application has been developed to create audience of avatars that display different motivational states that are known to affect musician's performance. The musicians' body expressions have then been recorded through a motion capture system and analysed as they relate to audience motivational state. The musician subjective experience has been captured after each performance through semi-structured interviews. Preliminary results depict the strategies implicitly employed by four expert violinists during their performances under the various contexts (empty room and engaged and disengaged audience of avatars). Finally, this study discusses the way to improve methodology, analyses and real-world responses to musician's needs.

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