Genetics of childhood disorders: L. Learning and memory, part 3: fear conditioning.

Ivan Pavlov, classical conditioning involves the pairing of neutral stimuli with aversive or appetitive cues. This results in learning. Formally neutral stimuli now predict salient events. One form of Pavlovian conditioning is fear conditioning, the primary associative learning mechanism involved in aversive emotional learning. It is through this process that we learn to be fearful of people, animals, objects, and places. From a psychological perspective, it is one of best understood types of learning in mammals because the stimulus and response properties can be very carefully controlled. For these reasons, Pavlovian fear conditioning has served as a powerful animal model of fear and anxiety disorders including phobia, panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and possibly many of the “neurotic”