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Updated: Nov 12, 2025

Human Fear Conditioning Conducted in Full Immersion 3-Dimensional Virtual Reality
Published on: August 9, 2010
Large-scale remote fear conditioning: Demonstration of associations with anxiety using the FLARe smartphone app
Thomas McGregor1, Kirstin L Purves1, Elena Constantinou1,2
1Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
Objectives:
We aimed to examine differences in fear conditioning between anxious and nonanxious participants in a single large sample.
Materials And Methods:
We employed a remote fear conditioning task (FLARe) to collect data from participants from the Twins Early Development Study (n = 1,146; 41% anxious vs. 59% nonanxious). Differences between groups were estimated for their expectancy of an aversive outcome towards a reinforced conditional stimulus (CS+) and an unreinforced conditional stimulus (CS-) during acquisition and extinction phases.
Results:
During acquisition, the anxious group (vs. nonanxious group) showed greater expectancy towards the CS-. During extinction, the anxious group (vs. nonanxious group) showed greater expectancy to both CSs. These comparisons yielded effect size estimates (d = 0.26-0.34) similar to those identified in previous meta-analyses.
Conclusion:
The current study demonstrates that remote fear conditioning can be used to detect differences between groups of anxious and nonanxious individuals, which appear to be consistent with previous meta-analyses including in-person studies.
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