Facilitated acquisition of eyeblink conditioning in those vulnerable to anxiety disorders

Abstract

Behavioral inhibition (BI) increases vulnerability to develop anxiety disorders and is typified by avoidance and withdrawal from novel objects, people, and situations. The present study considered the relationship between BI and temperamental risk factors, such as trait anxiety and acquisition rate of a classically conditioned eyeblink response. One-hundred seventy-four healthy undergraduate students (mean age 20.3 years, 71.8% female) were given the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and a battery of self-report measures of BI consisting of the Adult and Retrospective Measures of Behavioral Inhibition (AMBI/RMBI) and the Concurrent and Retrospective Self Report of Inhibition (CSRI/RSRI). Participants then underwent standard delay classical eyeblink conditioning consisting of 45 trials with a 500-ms CS overlapping and co-terminating with a 10-ms airpuff US. Individuals with higher scores on the AMBI and Trait Anxiety Inventory, but not the other measures, showed faster acquisition of a conditioned eyeblink response than individuals with lower scores. Results support a relationship between facilitated acquisition of inter-stimulus relationships and risk for anxiety, and suggest that some measures assessing anxiety vulnerability better capture this relationship than others.

The Relationship Between Behavioral Inhibition Strategies for Cognitive Regulation of Emotions and Young Adult Family of Life Events and Changes with Obsessive-Compulsive Traits in Students

“…The cut off score is 15.5 and discriminates inhibited from noninhibited individuals (21,22). High Cronbach's alpha of 0.78 was reported in some studies (23). Moreover, testretest reliability with a 2-week interval was 0.79 and convergent validity 0.55 (24).…”

Individual differences in resting-state functional connectivity with the executive network: support for a cerebellar role in anxiety vulnerability

“…However, individual differences in intrinsic connectivity may be a pre-existing risk factor for the development of an anxiety disorder. For example, a stress-diathesis approach suggests that anxiety is due to the interaction of risk factors such as sex, genetics, personality (Mineka and Zinbarg 2006), brain structure (Gilbertson et al 2002) and learning (Caulfield et al 2013;Holloway et al 2013;Caulfield et al 2015). It is likely that connectivity may also play an essential role in mediating risk for developing clinical anxiety.…”

“…Individual differences in learning performance were found on a cerebellar-mediated associative learning task (Caulfield et al 2013(Caulfield et al , 2015. In this task, participants were given a battery of measures related to risk for anxiety including the Adult Measure of Behavioral Inhibition (AMBI; Gladstone and Parker 2005), a measure of behavioral inhibition that has been linked to greater risk for developing clinical anxiety (Biederman et al 1990;Hirshfeld et al 1992;Biederman et al 2001;Schwartz et al 2012), and then underwent eyeblink classical conditioning.…”

“…It remains unclear why those with behaviorally inhibited temperament demonstrate individual differences in eyeblink conditioning (Caulfield et al 2013;Caulfield et al 2015), as well as enhanced avoidance learning (Sheynin et al 2013). Reciprocal connectivity between the cerebellum and cortical regions places it in a position to modulate higher cognitive processes via connections with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC).…”

“…As such, recent research studies have reported increased resting-state connectivity of the amygdala and insula in Veterans with PTSD, implicating the salience network (Sripada et al 2012). However, given previous research in cerebellarmediated eyeblink conditioning (Caulfield et al 2013(Caulfield et al , 2015, avoidance learning (Sheynin et al 2013), and taskbased fMRI (Blackford et al 2009), we hypothesized that regions in the cerebellum will significantly correlate with executive network resting-state fluctuations, with inhibited individuals demonstrating greater cerebellar connectivity with the executive network.…”