No robust differences in fear conditioning between patients with fear-related disorders and healthy controls.

No robust differences in fear conditioning between patients with fear-related disorders and healthy controls. Behav Res Ther. 2020 Mar 29;129:103610 Authors: Pöhlchen D, Leuchs L, Binder FP, Blaskovich B, Nantawisarakul T, Topalidis P, Brückl TM, Norrholm SD, Jovanovic T, Spoormaker VI, BeCOME working group Abstract Fear conditioning and extinction serve as a dominant model for the development and maintenance of pathological anxiety, particularly for phasic fear to specific stimuli or situations. The validity of this model would be supported by differences in the physiological or subjective fear response between patients with fear-related disorders and healthy controls, whereas the model's validity would be questioned by a lack of such differences. We derived pupillometry, skin conductance response and startle electromyography as well as unconditioned stimulus expectancy in a two-day fear acquisition, immediate extinction and recall task and compared an unmedicated group of patients (n = 73) with phobias or panic disorder and a group of patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD, n = 21) to a group of carefully screened healthy controls (n = 35). Bayesian statistics showed no convincing evidence for a difference in physiological and subjective responses between the groups during fear acquisition, extinction learning or recall. Only the PTSD subgroup had altered startle reactions during extinction learning. Our da...
Source: Behaviour Research and Therapy - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Behav Res Ther Source Type: research