Conditioned and extinguished fear modulate functional corticocardiac coupling in humans

Abstract

Although the conditioned cardiac fear response is an important index of psychophysiological fear processing, underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. N = 22 participants underwent differential fear conditioning and extinction with face pictures as conditioned stimuli (CS) and loud noise bursts as aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) on Day 1 and a recall test 1 day later. We assessed ERPs, evoked heart period (HP), and time-lagged within-subject correlations of single-trial EEG amplitude and HP as index for corticocardiac coupling in response to the CS. Fear-conditioned stimuli (CS+) triggered cardiac deceleration during fear acquisition and recall. Meanwhile, only during Day 1 acquisition, CS+ evoked larger late positivities in the ERP than CS-. Most importantly, during Day 2 recall, stimulus-evoked single-trial EEG responses in the time window between 250 and 500 ms predicted the magnitude of cardiac fear responses 2 to 5 s later. This marker of corticocardiac coupling selectively emerged in response to not previously extinguished CS+ but was absent in response to CS- or previously extinguished CS+. The present results provide first evidence that fear conditioning and extinction modulate functional corticocardiac coupling in humans. Underlying mechanisms may involve subcortical structures enhancing corticocardiac transmission to facilitate processing of consolidated conditioned fear.

Threat‐conditioned contexts modulate the late positive potential to faces—A mobile EEG/virtual reality study

“…Consistently, it has been demonstrated that fear-conditioned versus neutral stimuli lead to enhanced LPP amplitudes (Nelson, Weinberg, Pawluk, Gawlowska, & Proudfit, 2015;Panitz, Hermann, & Mueller, 2015) and capture as well as bind attention (Koster, Crombez, Van Damme, Verschuere, & De Houwer, 2005;Koster, Crombez, Van Damme et al, 2004;Schmidt et al, 2015). Due to the task irrelevance of the contexts, our results further provide evidence that attentional capture of threat contexts is relatively immune to distraction (Bishop, 2008).…”

“…Since the LPP has been reported to be highly sensitive for affective and motivational saliency (Hajcak et al, ), the observed increase of the early LPP to neutral faces in threat contexts may reflect the allocation of attentional resources toward threat. Consistently, it has been demonstrated that fear‐conditioned versus neutral stimuli lead to enhanced LPP amplitudes (Nelson, Weinberg, Pawluk, Gawlowska, & Proudfit, ; Panitz, Hermann, & Mueller, ) and capture as well as bind attention (Koster, Crombez, Van Damme, Verschuere, & De Houwer, ; Koster, Crombez, Van Damme et al, ; Koster, Crombez, Verschuere, & De Houwer, ; Schmidt et al, ). Due to the task irrelevance of the contexts, our results further provide evidence that attentional capture of threat contexts is relatively immune to distraction (Bishop, ).…”

Sympathetic responding to unconditioned stimuli predicts subsequent threat expectancy, orienting, and visuocortical bias in human aversive Pavlovian conditioning

“…Work comparing computational models may therefore benefit from exploring multimodal dynamics of threat expectancy. In particular, extended extinction may be explored in next-day threat recall or threat re-exposure for learning dynamics across response systems (Panitz et al, 2015). …”

The malleability of emotional perception: Short-term plasticity in retinotopic neurons accompanies the formation of perceptual biases to threat.

“…Heart-rate deceleration was compared 2-5 seconds after stimulus onset for the CS+ with each of the three CS- (Panitz, Hermann, & Mueller, 2015) using t-tests. 95% Confidence intervals and Cohen's d effect size estimates are also reported.…”