Generalization of conditioned responding: Effects of autobiographical memory specificity

Lenaert, Bert; Claes, Stephan; Raes, Filip; Boddez, Yannick; Joos, Els; Vervliet, Bram; Hermans, Dirk

doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2010.12.010

Cited by 16 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…In addition, there is a growing interest for the study of fear generalization and in particular the possible psychological and neurological processes that could influence the process of fear generalization (Vervliet et al, 2010a,b; Lenaert et al, 2012). However, in the field of pain, research on this topic received little attention so far.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generalization Gradients in Cued and Contextual Pain-Related Fear: An Experimental Study in Healthy Participants

Meulders¹,

Vandebroek²,

Vervliet³

et al. 2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Increasing evidence supports the notion that pain-related fear plays a key role in the transition from acute to chronic pain. Recent experimental data show that associative learning processes are involved in the acquisition of pain-related fear. An intriguing yet underinvestigated question entails how spreading of pain-related fear in chronic pain occurs. In a voluntary movement paradigm in which one arm movement (CS+) was followed by a painful stimulus and another was not (CS−) in the predictable group and painful stimuli were delivered during the intertrial interval (context alone) in the unpredictable group, we tested generalization of fear to six novel generalization movements (GSs) with varying levels of similarity between the original CS+ movement and CS− movement. Healthy participants (N = 58) were randomly assigned to the predictable or unpredictable group. Fear was measured via verbal ratings and eyeblink startle responses. Results indicated that cued pain-related fear spreads selectively to novel movements that are proprioceptively more similar to the CS+ than to those similar to the CS− in the predictable group, but not in the unpredictable group. This is the first study to demonstrate a generalization gradient of cued pain-related fear. However, this effect was only present in the startle eyeblink responses, but not in the verbal ratings. Taken together, this paradigm represents a novel tool to scrutinize the largely understudied phenomenon of the spreading of fear and avoidance in patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain and mapping possible pathological differences in generalization gradients and the spreading of pain in patients as compared with healthy controls.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generalization Gradients in Cued and Contextual Pain-Related Fear: An Experimental Study in Healthy Participants

Meulders¹,

Vandebroek²,

Vervliet³

et al. 2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…Yet more mild UCSs, which may be relatively more suitable, may not be sufficiently aversive to produce conditioned and generalised fear. For example one generalisation study used an image of a lightning bolt as the UCS (Lenaert et al, 2011). Although this was successful in eliciting elevated UCS expectancy ratings for the CS' but not the CS( (both faces), the authors did not even measure conditioned fear of the CSs, presumably because the UCS (image of a lightening bolt) is CONDITIONING AND STIMULUS GENERALISATION COGNITION AND EMOTION, 2013, 27 (5) clearly not an aversive stimulus that would be expected to elicit conditioned fear.…”

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confidence: 99%

Measuring the role of conditioning and stimulus generalisation in common fears and worries

Haddad

Raeder

et al. 2013

Cognition & Emotion

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Common and persistent fears may emerge through learning mechanisms such as fear conditioning and generalisation. Although there have been extensive studies of these learning processes in healthy but also psychiatric samples, many of the tasks used to produce conditioning and assess generalisation either use painful and aversive stimuli as the unconditioned stimuli (UCS), or suffer from poor belongingness between the conditioned stimuli and the UCS. Here, we present novel data from a paradigm designed to examine fear conditioning and generalisation in healthy individuals. Two female faces served as conditioned threat cue (CS+) and conditioned safety cue (CS-) respectively. The CS+ was paired repeatedly with a fearful, screaming face (unconditioned stimulus). Generalisation included intermediate faces which varied in their similarity to the CS+ and CS-. We measured eyeblink startle reflex and self-reported ratings. Acquired fear of the CS+ generalised to intermediate stimuli in proportion to their perceptual similarity to the CS+. Our findings demonstrate how fears of new individuals may develop based on resemblance to others with whom an individual has had negative experiences. The paradigm offers new opportunities for probing the role of generalisation in the emergence of common and persistent fears.

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“…Even where control can be obtained – as in the use of facial morphs (Lenaert et al, 2012) – the use of real-world stimuli may be confounded by individual differences in the affective value of a particular image, as well as previous experience with particular kinds of stimuli. Such stimuli may only be of use in research evaluating behavioural responses in clinical or subclinical samples for whom one already expects a certain response, as with the presentation of spider images in a phobic population (e.g., Rowe and Craske, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other behavioural research, the effect of such speculation is that individual features of a given stimulus set may have an unexpected confounding effect. For example, Lenaert et al (2012) used facial morphs where a similarity gradient was derived from the gradual merging of two perceptually dissimilar faces (e.g., if Face A is 100% then the most similar face is 90% Face A and 10% of the perceptually dissimilar Face B). Face A was first paired with a lightning bolt image and in the subsequent phase they measured the extent to which participants expected the lightning bolt for each of the faces along the morphological gradient between Face A and B.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This was despite their being positioned equally from the other faces on the morphological gradient. Lenaert et al (2012) may have been able to control for or investigate the contribution of such features to the generalization of expectancy if an a priori investigation into similarity had taken place. Similarly, in their original presentation Williams (1998) suggests that they expect Fribbles to be linearly dissimilar from one another based on the number of shared features with a prototype, but they do not provide data on whether individual Fribble features can have different effects on similarity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Meet the Fribbles: novel stimuli for use within behavioural research

Barry¹,

Griffith²,

Rossi³

et al. 2014

Front. Psychol.

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Clinical researchers make use of experimental models for mental disorders. In many cases, these models use stimuli that are relevant to the disorder under scrutiny, which allows one to experimentally investigate the factors that contribute to the development of the disorder. For example, one might use spiders or spider-like stimuli in the study of specific phobia. More broadly, researchers often make use of real-world stimuli such as images of animals, geometrical shapes or emotional words. However, these stimuli are often limited in their experimental controllability and their applicability to the disorder in question. We present a novel set of animal-like stimuli, called Fribbles, for use within behavioural research. Fribbles have desirable properties for use in research because they are similar to real-world stimuli, but due to their novelty, participants will not have had previous experience with them. They also have known properties that can be experimentally manipulated. We present an investigation into similarity between Fribbles in order to illustrate their utility in research that relies on comparisons between similar stimuli. Fribbles offer both experimental control and generalisability to the real world, although some consideration must be made concerning the properties that influence similarity between Fribbles when selecting them along a dimension of similarity.

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Generalization of conditioned responding: Effects of autobiographical memory specificity

Cited by 16 publications

References 33 publications

Generalization Gradients in Cued and Contextual Pain-Related Fear: An Experimental Study in Healthy Participants

Generalization Gradients in Cued and Contextual Pain-Related Fear: An Experimental Study in Healthy Participants

Measuring the role of conditioning and stimulus generalisation in common fears and worries

Meet the Fribbles: novel stimuli for use within behavioural research

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