Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spiders) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the same category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa. Fear-relevant pictures were found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones. Fear-relevant, but not fear-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the display and by the numb...

Fear learning occurs in response to positive prediction error, when the expected outcome of a conditioning trial exceeds that predicted by the conditioned stimuli present. This role for error in Pavlovian association formation is best exemplified by the phenomenon of associative blocking, whereby prior fear conditioning of conditioned stimulus (CS) A is able to prevent learning to CSB when they...

The basolateral amygdala's involvement in fear acquisition and expression to visual and auditory stimuli is well known. The involvement of the basolateral and other amygdala areas in fear acquisition and expression to stimuli of other modalities is less certain. We evaluated the contribution of the basolateral and medial amygdala to olfactory and to context fear and fear conditioning by infusin...

The purpose of this study was to identify the prevalence of fear, anxiety and beliefs about surgery amongst coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) candidates and to evaluate the correlations between fear and anxiety and other relevant factors. A total of 277 patients hospitalized for CABG between October 2011 and January 2012 were included in this study. The Bypass Grafting Fear Scale and ...

Abnormal fear conditioning processes (including fear acquisition and conditioned fear-generalization) have been implicated in the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. Previous research has shown that individuals with panic disorder present enhanced conditioned fear-generalization in comparison to healthy controls. Enhanced conditioned fear-generalization could also characterize generalized anxiet...

To provide insight into individual differences in fear learning, we examined the emotional and cognitive expressions of discriminative fear conditioning in direct relation to its neural substrates. Contrary to previous behavioral-neural (fMRI) research on fear learning--in which the emotional expression of fear was generally indexed by skin conductance--we used fear-potentiated startle, a more ...

Numerous investigations have definitively shown amygdalar involvement in delay and contextual fear conditioning. However, much less is known about amygdala contributions to trace fear conditioning, and what little evidence exists is conflicting as noted in previous studies. This discrepancy may result from selective targeting of individual nuclei within the amygdala. The present experiments fur...

Fear of heights results in the experience of dizziness and measurable body sway. We investigated the relationship between fear, dizziness, and body sway during height exposure 16 m above ground. Thirty five healthy participants stood on a force-plate to measure sway before, during, and after exposure and an ECG was recorded. Self-report measures were anticipated fear and dizziness before exposu...

In three experiments, chronic stress enhancement of subsequent fear learning was investigated in C57Bl/6 mice. The first experiment focused on the influence of stressor type on subsequent Pavlovian fear learning. Male mice were subjected to 7d of either repeated restraint stress or chronic variable stress before undergoing a fear conditioning procedure with three tone-shock trials. Subsequent t...