The Influence of State Anxiety on Fear Discrimination and Extinction in Females

DOI

Formal theories have linked pathological anxiety to a failure in fear response inhibition. Previously, we showed that aberrant response inhibition is not restricted to anxiety patients, but can also be observed in anxiety-prone adults. However, less is known about the influence of currently experienced levels of anxiety on inhibitory learning. The topic is highly important as state anxiety has a debilitating effect on cognition, emotion, and physiology and is linked to several anxiety disorders. In the present study, healthy female volunteers performed a fear conditioning task, after being informed that they will have to perform the Trier Social Stress Test task (n D 25; experimental group) or a control task (n D 25; control group) upon completion of the conditioning task. The results showed that higher levels of state anxiety corresponded with a reduced discrimination between a stimulus (CSC) typically followed by an aversive event and a stimulus (CS􀀀) that is never followed by an aversive event both during the acquisition and the extinction phase. No effect of state anxiety on the skin conductance response associated with CSC and CS􀀀 was found. Additionally, higher levels of state anxiety coincided with more negative valence ratings of the CSs. The results suggest that increased stress-induced state anxiety might lead to stimulus generalization during fear acquisition, thereby impairing associative learning.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/YDXP6Z
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00347
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/YDXP6Z
Provenance
Creator Dibbets, Pauline ORCID logo; Evers, Elisabeth A.T. ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Dibbets, Pauline; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2019
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Dibbets, Pauline (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav
Size 65014; 54094; 42918; 5971
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences