Cued aversive classical conditioning in humans: The role of trait-anxiety

Abstract

No study so far has specifically addressed the influence of individual differences in trait-anxiety on aversive classical conditioning as indexed by the startle reflex response. We compared the startle reflex responses between participants classified as high (n = 25) and low (n = 26) in trait-anxiety while undergoing a single-cue aversive classical conditioning procedure. High trait-anxiety group showed a greater startle response to the CS relative to the ITI at the post-acquisition compared with the pre-acquisition phase. Low trait-anxiety group did not show such a clear pattern of conditioning, and results from this group seem to be concealed by differences in the startle responses to the CS and the ITI during the pre-acquisition phase. However, a post-hoc analysis in which such differences at pre-conditioning were removed showed no conditioning effects in low trait-anxiety participants. Taking together, these results suggest differences between high and low trait-anxiety groups in the acquisition of the CS-US association. However, further research should clarify the unexpected pattern of responses shown by low trait-anxiety group.

Contribution of the Roman rat lines/strains to personality neuroscience: neurobehavioral modeling of internalizing/externalizing psychopathologies

“…For example, relative to RHA rats, RLAs present increased signs of anxiety in typical anxiety tests such as the Vogel's punished-drinking, the elevated zero-and plus-maze and light-dark box tests among others; they also show enhanced frustration-related (Amsel, 1992) responding under reward devaluation, and heightened stress-linked endocrine and depressive-like responses (reviewed by Fernández-Teruel et al, 2021;Giorgi et al, 2019). Remarkably, RLAs also exhibit increased context-and cue-conditioned freezing and, like high trait-anxiety humans (Andión et al, 2013), RLAs display enhanced stress-and fear(cue)-potentiated startle (Aguilar, Gil, Tobeña, Escorihuela & Fernández-Teruel, 2000;López-Aumatell et al, 2009). From the perspective of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework (for Review, see Michelini, Palumbo, DeYoung, Latzman & Kotov, 2021) such a profile suggests that RLA rats are mainly driven by "negative valence" (e.g., Michelini et al, 2021) (see section A in Table 1).…”