Citation

Struyf D, Zaman J, Hermans D, Vervliet B. Behav. Res. Ther. 2017; 93: 116-122.

Affiliation

Center for the Psychology of Learning and Experimental Psychopathology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, Box 3712, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; Behavioral Neuroscience Program, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, 149 13th St, Charlestown, MA 02129, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.brat.2017.04.001

PMID

28410461

Abstract

The current experiment investigated whether overgeneralization of fear could be due to an inability to perceptually discriminate the initial fear-evoking stimulus from similar stimuli, as fear learning-induced perceptual impairments have been reported but their influence on generalization gradients remain to be elucidated. Three hundred and sixty-eight healthy volunteers participated in a differential fear conditioning paradigm with circles of different sizes as conditioned stimuli (CS), of which one was paired to an aversive IAPS picture. During generalization, each subject was presented with one of 10 different sized circles including the CSs, and were asked to categorize the stimulus as either a CS or as novel after fear responses were recorded. Linear mixed models were used to investigate differences in fear generalization gradients depending on the participant's perception of the test stimulus. We found that the incorrect perception of a novel stimulus as the initial fear-evoking stimulus strongly boosted fear responses. The current findings demonstrate that a significant number of novel stimuli used to assess generalization are incorrectly identified as the initial fear-evoking stimulus, providing a perceptual account for the observed overgeneralization in panic and anxiety disorders. Accordingly, enhancing perceptual processing may be a promising treatment for targeting excessive fear generalization.

Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Conditioning; Fear generalization; Gradients; Perception; STAI-T