Correlations between psychological tests and physiological responses during fear conditioning and renewal

Abstract

BackgroundAnxiety disorders are characterized by specific emotions, thoughts and physiological responses. Little is known, however, about the relationship between psychological/personality indices of anxiety responses to fear stimuli.MethodsWe studied this relationship in healthy subjects by comparing scores on psychological and personality questionnaires with results of an experimental fear conditioning paradigm using a visual conditioned stimulus (CS). We measured skin conductance response (SCR) during habituation, conditioning, and extinction; subsequently testing for recall and renewal of fear 24 hours later.ResultsWe found that multiple regression models explained 45% of the variance during conditioning to the CS+, and 24% of the variance during renewal of fear to the CS+. Factors that explained conditioning included lower levels of conscientiousness, increased baseline reactivity (SCL), and response to the shock (UCR). Low levels of extraversion correlated with greater renewal. No model could be found to explain extinction learning or extinction recall to the CS+.ConclusionsThe lack of correlation of fear extinction with personality and neuropsychological indices suggests that extinction may be less determined by trait variables and cognitive state, and may depend more on the subject’s current emotional state. The negative correlation between fear renewal and extraversion suggests that this personality characteristic may protect against post-treatment relapse of symptoms of anxiety disorders.

Individual differences in fear acquisition: multivariate analyses of different emotional negativity scales, physiological responding, subjective measures, and neural activation

“…Hence, improved understanding of the personality related and neurobiological processes underlying individual differences in experimental fear learning can be expected to translate into improved understanding on how adaptive responding to threats turns into maladaptive fear responding 119 , 120 . It will thus be important to extend the investigation of individual differences and the underlying neurobiology beyond experimental fear acquisition to tests focusing on the long-term retention of fear and extinction memory (i.e., return of fear 121 ), and ultimately to clinical populations. We provide a very first step towards this overarching aim towards ultimately improving our mechanistic understanding of pathological fear and emotional responding.…”

Deficient inhibitory processing in trait anxiety: Evidence from context-dependent fear learning, extinction recall and renewal

“…While the currently observed association between STAI trait scores and subjective fear ratings on day 1 is robust, it has to be acknowledged that others did not find associations between fear conditioning and STAI scores (Martínez et al, 2012;Torrents-Rodas et al, 2013) or other measures of negative affect such as neuroticism (Fredrikson and Georgiades, 1992;Otto et al, 2007;Pineles et al, 2009). These negative findings might be attributed to a lack of power due to rather small sample sizes employed in these studies.…”

“…During the past years, the importance for adaptive responding of the latter inhibitory safety learning processes has gained increasing attention (Kong et al 2014, Pollak et al 2010, and pathological anxiety has been linked to deficits in inhibitory fear M a n u s c r i p t 4 processing and/or maladaptive stimulus generalization during fear learning (Gazendam et al, 2013;Haddad et al, 2012;Indovina et al, 2011;Kindt and Soeter, 2014), extinction (Gazendam et al, 2013;Sehlmeyer et al, 2011) and return of fear (Kindt et al, 2009;Kindt and Soeter, 2013;Soeter and Kindt, 2010). However, these results (Martínez et al, 2012;Torrents-Rodas et al, 2013) and results based on other measures of negative affect (Fredrikson and Georgiades, 1992;Otto et al, 2007;Pineles et al, 2009) are not unequivocal with respect to the impact of anxiety levels on fear-related processes.…”

“…This is of critical importance, as anxiety has been linked to a tendency for context conditioning (Grillon, 2002) and as fear extinction has been shown to be inherently bound to the context in which (extinction) learning takes place Bouton and King, 1983;Maren et al, 2013). M a n u s c r i p t 5 In previous studies investigating an association between conditioning/extinction and trait anxiety, dichotomous classifications have mostly been employed (such as median-split (Haddad et al, 2012;Kindt and Soeter, 2014) or recruitment of extreme groups (Gazendam et al, 2013;Torrents-Rodas et al, 2013) while only few studies have employed truly dimensional approaches (Indovina et al, 2011;Martínez et al, 2012;Sehlmeyer et al, 2011).…”

Influence of intranasal oxytocin on fear consolidation in healthy humans

“…Participants were recruited through local advertisement and included healthy adults aged 18–65 years. Based on a prior finding that low conscientiousness was associated with greater likelihood of acquiring conditioned responses in the laboratory,22 participants were required to score less than 42 on the conscientiousness subscale of the NEO Five Factor Personality Inventory 23. Any current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) Axis I diagnosis or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, as well as a lifetime diagnosis of psychotic disorder, bipolar disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder as measured by the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID-IV24), was exclusionary.…”