Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Tiensestraat 102, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium.
Biol Psychol. 2010 Dec;85(3):361-9. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.08.007. Epub 2010 Aug 26.
Chronic anxiety may differ from cued fear and hence require other treatment strategies. In a human fear conditioning paradigm, chronic anxiety to the experimental context was experimentally induced by presenting unpredictable shocks. Two methods to reduce chronic anxiety were tested and compared. First, in parallel with the standard extinction procedure, participants were exposed to the anxiety-eliciting context in the absence of shocks (context-exposure group). Second, an alternative procedure was tested in which the previously unpredictable shocks were now signaled by a specific cue (signaled group). A control group continued to receive unsignaled shocks. Results indicated that chronic contextual anxiety, as measured by fear-potentiated startle and US-expectancy ratings, was equally reduced in the context-exposure group as in the signaled group compared with the control group. When applied to the treatment of, for example, panic disorder, these findings support the idea that exposure to the context in which the unpredictable panic attacks occurred and making unpredictable panic attacks predictable, are both valuable methods in order to reduce chronic anxiety.
慢性焦虑可能与条件性恐惧不同，因此需要采用其他治疗策略。在人类恐惧条件反射范式中，通过呈现不可预测的电击来人为诱发对实验环境的慢性焦虑。本研究测试并比较了两种减轻慢性焦虑的方法。首先，与标准的消退程序并行，参与者在没有电击的情况下暴露于引起焦虑的环境中（环境暴露组）。其次，测试了一种替代程序，其中先前不可预测的电击现在由特定线索提示（提示组）。对照组继续接受无提示的电击。结果表明，与对照组相比，条件性焦虑（通过惊吓反射和 US 预期评分来衡量）在环境暴露组和提示组中同样得到了减轻。当应用于治疗例如惊恐障碍时，这些发现支持这样一种观点，即暴露于发生不可预测的惊恐发作的环境中和使不可预测的惊恐发作变得可预测，都是减少慢性焦虑的有效方法。
