Department of Psychology, University of Leuven, Belgium.
Biol Psychol. 2013 Jan;92(1):51-8. doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.01.006. Epub 2012 Jan 26.
The main behavioral signature of fear extinction is its fragility. This is exemplified by the renewal effect, where a change in the background context produces recovery of fear to a conditioned-and-extinguished stimulus. Renewal is the backbone of a widely accepted theory of extinction in animal research, as well as an important experimental model to screen novel treatment techniques. This has led to an explosion of fear renewal research in humans. However, the mere observation of return of fear in a renewal procedure is not sufficient to validate this particular theory of extinction in the tested sample/procedure. Here, we systematically outline a set of experimental tests that aid in evaluating alternative extinction/renewal mechanisms. We examine published renewal studies in human fear conditioning and conclude that the prevailing theory of extinction is often taken for granted, but critical tests are lacking. Including these tests in future research will not only reveal the fear extinction mechanism in humans, but also inspire further developments in extinction treatment research.
恐惧消退的主要行为特征是其脆弱性。这种脆弱性的一个例子是再发效应，即背景环境的变化会导致条件化和消退的刺激重新产生恐惧。再发是动物研究中广泛接受的一种消退理论的基础，也是筛选新的治疗技术的重要实验模型。这导致了人类对恐惧再发研究的爆炸式增长。然而，仅仅观察到在再发程序中恐惧的回归，不足以在测试样本/程序中验证这一特定的消退理论。在这里，我们系统地概述了一组实验测试，以帮助评估替代的消退/再发机制。我们检查了人类恐惧条件反射的已发表的再发研究，并得出结论，即目前的消退理论往往被视为理所当然，但缺乏关键的测试。在未来的研究中纳入这些测试不仅将揭示人类的恐惧消退机制，还将激发消退治疗研究的进一步发展。
