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Published July 2022 | Published
Journal Article Open

Starting fear is a stronger predictor of long-term fear than rate of change in fear in human fear conditioning

Abstract

In rodent studies, faster extinction rate has been shown to predict less long-term fear. However, this has scarcely been studied in humans. The present report investigated the association between extinction rate and long-term fear in humans. We secondarily evaluated specificity of extinction rate by including other fear conditioning values as predictors, including acquisition intercept, acquisition rate, and extinction intercept. Lastly, we investigated whether trait measures of behavioral approach, behavioral inhibition, anxiety, and depression predicted long-term fear. Results show that slower extinction rate predicted less long-term fear when tested alone in the model. However, when including other fear conditioning variables, extinction rate no longer predicted long-term fear. Instead, greater fear at the beginning of acquisition was the most robust predictor of greater long-term fear (all three measures of fear), followed by greater fear at the beginning of extinction (unconditional stimulus expectancy only). These effects occurred for both the danger signal (i.e., conditional stimulus; CS+) and safety signal (i.e., CS−). The results suggest that fear at the start of acquisition and, secondarily, extinction are predictors of long-term fear. Lastly, there were no effects of trait behavioral approach, behavioral inhibition, anxiety, or depression. This report has relevance for improving our understanding and treatment of anxiety disorders.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2022. Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Date received: 21 June 2021; accepted: 16 June 2022. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the University of California, Los Angeles Dissertation Year Fellowship award. The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023