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Protection from extinction in human fear conditioning.

P F Lovibond¹, N R Davis, A S O'Flaherty

¹School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. p.lovibond@unsw.edu.au

Behaviour Research and Therapy

|September 27, 2000

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Adding a safety signal or another predictor of fear can disrupt the extinction of learned fear responses in humans. This interference with fear extinction highlights the importance of context in therapies like exposure therapy.

Area of Science:

Behavioral neuroscience
Human autonomic conditioning
Fear extinction

Background:

Extinction of learned fear is crucial for treating anxiety disorders.
Understanding factors that interfere with extinction is vital for therapeutic success.
Concurrent stimuli may play a significant role in the process of fear extinction.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how an added stimulus interferes with the extinction of a target excitatory fear stimulus in human autonomic conditioning.
To determine if inhibitory or excitatory added stimuli disrupt fear extinction.
To explore factors contributing to protection from extinction.

Main Methods:

Two experiments utilized human autonomic conditioning paradigms.
A target excitatory stimulus (predicting shock) was paired with an added stimulus (inhibitory or excitatory).

Related Experiment Videos

Fear extinction was assessed using self-reported shock expectancy and skin conductance measures.

Main Results:

Both inhibitory and excitatory added stimuli disrupted the extinction of the target fear stimulus.
Subjects exhibited a return of fear when the target stimulus was tested alone, indicating failed extinction.
Protection from extinction occurred even when the added stimulus was not inhibitory.

Conclusions:

Concurrent stimuli significantly interfere with fear extinction, even when not inhibitory.
Factors like context-specificity, occasion-setting, and external inhibition may contribute to protection from extinction.
Maintaining similarity between concurrent stimuli and the desired transfer context is essential for effective exposure therapy.