Don't fear 'fear conditioning': Methodological considerations for the design and analysis of studies on human fear acquisition, extinction, and return of fear

TL;DR: Overall, the extant literature supports a key role of aversive associative learning in the development and treatment of anxiety disorders, however, research targeting specific mechanisms such as extinction generalization and avoidance, the fragility of extinction, and moderating influences of individual differences pertinent to anxiety disorders is needed.

TL;DR: This work for the first time presents a comprehensive literature overview and methodological discussion on inter-individual differences in fear acquisition, extinction and return of fear, and identifies methodological pitfalls and provides suggestions for study design and analyses tailored to individual difference research in fear conditioning.

TL;DR: It is illustrated how flexibility in data collection and analysis can be avoided, which will benefit the robustness and replicability of research findings and can be expected to be applicable to other fields of research that involve a learning element.

TL;DR: It is argued that the BNST is involved in organizing fear responses to stimuli that poorly predict when danger will occur, no matter the duration, modality, or complexity of those stimuli.

TL;DR: The findings suggest that multi-context extinction can reduce fear relapse following an aversive event--an event that often induces return of fear in real-world settings--and provides empirical support for conducting exposure-based clinical treatments across a variety of environments.

TL;DR: Higher contextual fear is confirmed in participants who do not acquire a conditioned response to the cue in comparison to participants who did, following previous work that predicted failure to learn the CS-US association would result in higher contextual fear.

TL;DR: It is argued that the blocking shown in the present experiments resulted from the operation, not of an error-correction learning rule, nor of a simple contingency detection mechanism, but of a more complex inferential process based on propositional knowledge.

TL;DR: It is shown that the risk allele of this polymorphism is associated with impaired retention of fear extinction memory and heightened anxiety and depressive symptoms in humans, highlighting the STPP as a potential genetic locus underlying interindividual differences in serotonin transporter function in humans.