Overgeneralization of Conditioned Fear as a Pathogenic Marker of Panic Disorder

Overgeneralization of conditioned fear as a pathogenic marker of panic disorder.

OBJECTIVE Classical conditioning features prominently in many etiological accounts of panic disorder. According to such accounts, neutral conditioned stimuli present during panic attacks acquire panicogenic properties. Conditioned stimuli triggering panic symptoms are not limited to the original conditioned stimuli but are thought to generalize to stimuli resembling those co-occurring with pani...

Generalized anxiety disorder is associated with overgeneralization of classically conditioned fear.

BACKGROUND Meta-analytic results of fear-conditioning studies in the anxiety disorders implicate generalization of conditioned fear to stimuli resembling the conditioned danger cue as one of the more robust conditioning markers of anxiety pathology. Due to the absence of conditioning studies assessing generalization in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), results of this meta-analysis do not rev...

The overprediction of fear and panic in panic disorder.

The present study examined changes in the prediction of fear and panic in a clinical sample of patients (N = 25) meeting DSM-III-R criteria for panic disorder with agoraphobia (PDA). Data were collected for approx. 2000 trials of in vivo exposure. As expected, PDA patients displayed a bias for overpredicting both the level of fear and the likelihood of panic during an exposure trial. This overp...

Interoceptive fear conditioning and panic disorder: the role of conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus predictability.

Interoceptive fear conditioning is at the core of contemporary behavioral accounts of panic disorder. Yet, to date only one study has attempted to evaluate interoceptive fear conditioning in humans (see Acheson, Forsyth, Prenoveau, & Bouton, 2007). That study used brief (physiologically inert) and longer-duration (panicogenic) inhalations of 20% CO(2)-enriched air as an interoceptive conditione...

Fear and Panic of COVID-19