Delgado M R, Olsson A, Phelps E A
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ 07102, USA.
Biol Psychol. 2006 Jul;73(1):39-48. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2006.01.006. Epub 2006 Feb 10.
A goal of fear and anxiety research is to understand how to treat the potentially devastating effects of anxiety disorders in humans. Much of this research utilizes classical fear conditioning, a simple paradigm that has been extensively investigated in animals, helping outline a brain circuitry thought to be responsible for the acquisition, expression and extinction of fear. The findings from non-human animal research have more recently been substantiated and extended in humans, using neuropsychological and neuroimaging methodologies. Research across species concur that the neural correlates of fear conditioning include involvement of the amygdala during all stages of fear learning, and prefrontal areas during the extinction phase. This manuscript reviews how animal models of fear are translated to human behavior, and how some fears are more easily acquired in humans (i.e., social-cultural). Finally, using the knowledge provided by a rich animal literature, we attempt to extend these findings to human models targeted to helping facilitate extinction or abolishment of fears, a trademark of anxiety disorders, by discussing efficacy in modulating the brain circuitry involved in fear conditioning via pharmacological treatments or emotion regulation cognitive strategies.
恐惧与焦虑研究的一个目标是了解如何治疗焦虑症对人类可能造成的毁灭性影响。这项研究大多采用经典恐惧条件反射，这是一种在动物身上已得到广泛研究的简单范式，有助于勾勒出被认为负责恐惧的习得、表达和消退的大脑回路。最近，利用神经心理学和神经成像方法，非人类动物研究的结果在人类身上得到了证实和扩展。跨物种研究一致认为，恐惧条件反射的神经关联包括杏仁核在恐惧学习的所有阶段都有参与，而前额叶区域在消退阶段参与其中。本手稿回顾了恐惧动物模型如何转化为人类行为，以及某些恐惧如何在人类中更容易习得（即社会文化方面）。最后，利用丰富的动物文献提供的知识，我们试图将这些发现扩展到旨在帮助促进恐惧消退或消除的人类模型中，恐惧消退是焦虑症的一个特征，通过讨论通过药物治疗或情绪调节认知策略调节参与恐惧条件反射的大脑回路的功效来实现。
