Measuring the role of conditioning and stimulus generalisation in common fears and worries

Abstract

Common and persistent fears may emerge through learning mechanisms such as fear conditioning and generalisation. Although there have been extensive studies of these learning processes in healthy but also psychiatric samples, many of the tasks used to produce conditioning and assess generalisation either use painful and aversive stimuli as the unconditioned stimuli (UCS), or suffer from poor belongingness between the conditioned stimuli and the UCS. Here, we present novel data from a paradigm designed to examine fear conditioning and generalisation in healthy individuals. Two female faces served as conditioned threat cue (CS+) and conditioned safety cue (CS-) respectively. The CS+ was paired repeatedly with a fearful, screaming face (unconditioned stimulus). Generalisation included intermediate faces which varied in their similarity to the CS+ and CS-. We measured eyeblink startle reflex and self-reported ratings. Acquired fear of the CS+ generalised to intermediate stimuli in proportion to their perceptual similarity to the CS+. Our findings demonstrate how fears of new individuals may develop based on resemblance to others with whom an individual has had negative experiences. The paradigm offers new opportunities for probing the role of generalisation in the emergence of common and persistent fears.

Fear Generalization in Humans: Systematic Review and Implications for Anxiety Disorder Research

“…Haddad, Xu, Raeder, and Lau (2013) predicted that this CS-US combination might increase belongingness within the CS-US relation and facilitate fear learning and generalization. This "screaming lady" paradigm was tested with a group of healthy young adults.…”

Perceptual and conceptual similarities facilitate the generalization of instructed fear

“…Variants that closely resemble the CSþ evoke more fear than variants that have less in common with the CSþ (e.g. Haddad, Xu, Raeder, & Lau, 2013;Lenaert et al, 2014;Lissek et al, 2010;Lommen, Engelhard, & van den Hout, 2010).…”

Frozen with fear: Conditioned suppression in a virtual reality model of human anxiety

“…Presenting variable CS+ and CS− durations also has the advantage of being better suited to elicit immediate freezing-like responses by removing temporal sources of learning about the US, which may have been acquired during training. Second, we employed a US consisting of a 90db female scream because previous studies found it sufficiently aversive to influence operant behavior and ethically acceptable for use with a range of conditioning tasks and participants (Britton et al, 2011;Haddad et al, 2014). Finally, in order to definitively ascertain whether or not a CS+ is capable of eliciting freezing-like responses in a VR paradigm such as this, we included an additional novel cue that lacks a prior conditioning history at test and compared suppression obtained with CS+ and CS−.…”