Citation

Hammell AE, Helwig NE, Kaczkurkin AN, Sponheim SR, Lissek S. Behav. Res. Ther. 2019; 124: e103513.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Elliot Hall, 75 East River Parkway, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA. Electronic address: smlissek@umn.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.brat.2019.103513

PMID

31864116

Abstract

One key conditioning abnormality in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is heightened generalization of fear from a conditioned danger-cue (CS+) to similarly appearing safe stimuli. The present work represents the first effort to track the time-course of heightened generalization in PTSD with the prediction of heightened PTSD-related over-generalization in earlier but not later trials. This prediction derives from past discriminative fear-conditioning studies providing incidental evidence that over-generalization in PTSD may be reduced with sufficient learning trials. In the current study, we re-analyzed previously published conditioned fear-generalization data (Kaczkurkin et al., 2017) including combat veterans with PTSD (n = 15) or subthreshold PTSD (SubPTSD: n = 18), and trauma controls (TC: n = 19). This re-analysis aimed to identify the trial-by-trial course of group differences in generalized perceived risk across three classes of safe generalization stimuli (GSs) parametrically varying in similarity to a CS+ paired with shock. Those with PTSD and SubPTSD, relative to TC, displayed significantly elevated generalization to all GSs combined in early but not late generalization trials. Additionally, over-generalization in PTSD and SubPTSD persisted across trials to a greater extent for classes of GSs bearing higher resemblance to CS+. Such results suggest that PTSD-related over-generalization of conditioned threat expectancies can be reduced with sufficient exposure to unreinforced GSs and accentuate the importance of analyzing trial-by-trial changes when assessing over-generalization in clinical populations.

Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Exposure therapy; Fear-conditioning; Generalization; Nonparametric regression; Posttraumatic stress disorder; Threat expectancy