Individual differences in predicting aversive events and modulating contextual anxiety in a context and cue...

Deficient fear conditioning leads to maladaptive contextual anxiety as predicting danger is a key factor in regulating anxiety. A virtual reality conditioning task was used to evaluate cue learning and contextual anxiety with fear-potentiated startle and subjective fear in two experiments. In Experiment 1, failure to condition to a cue resulted in a constant state of context anxiety (subjective fearfulness and startle). Trait anxiety was unrelated to learning cue contingencies but the participants who failed to learn scored lower on a self-report measure of attentional control. Part of the group that learned the cue contingency failed to deduce safety of the context and hence did not reduce their contextual anxiety. Experiment 2 specifically focused on isolating this process and demonstrated an inverse association between trait anxiety and adaptive modulation of contextual anxiety. In conclusion, predicting threat aids in but not automatically implies successful regulation of contextual anxiety. High trait anxiety may increase risk of deficient modulation of contextual anxiety.