Zlomuzica Armin, Preusser Friederike, Schneider Silvia, Margraf Jürgen
Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum Bochum, Germany.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2015 Oct 16;9:270. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00270. eCollection 2015.
Self-efficacy has been proposed as an important element of a successful cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT). Positive changes in perceived self-efficacy have been linked to an improved adaptive emotional and behavioral responding in the context of anxiety-provoking situations. Furthermore, a positive influence of increased self-efficacy on cognitive functions has been confirmed. The present study examined the effect of verbal persuasion on perceived self-efficacy and fear extinction. Healthy participants were subjected to a standardized differential fear conditioning paradigm. After fear acquisition, half of the participants received a verbal persuasion aimed at increasing perceived self-efficacy. The extinction of fear was assessed immediately thereafter on both the implicit and explicit level. Our results suggest that an increased perceived self-efficacy was associated with enhanced extinction, evidenced on the psychophysiological level and accompanied by more pronounced decrements in conditioned negative valence. Changes in extinction were not due to a decrease in overall emotional reactivity to conditioned stimuli (CS). In addition, debriefing participants about the false positive feedback did not affect the processing of already extinguished conditioned responses during a subsequent continued extinction phase. Our results suggest that positive changes in perceived self-efficacy can be beneficial for emotional learning. Findings are discussed with respect to strategies aimed at increasing extinction learning in the course of exposure-based treatments.
自我效能感已被视为成功的认知行为疗法（CBT）的一个重要要素。在引发焦虑的情境中，自我效能感的积极变化与适应性情绪和行为反应的改善有关。此外，自我效能感增强对认知功能的积极影响也已得到证实。本研究考察了言语劝说对自我效能感认知及恐惧消退的影响。健康参与者接受了标准化的差异恐惧条件反射范式。在恐惧习得后，一半参与者接受旨在增强自我效能感认知的言语劝说。此后立即在隐式和显式水平上评估恐惧的消退情况。我们的结果表明，自我效能感认知增强与消退增强相关，这在心理生理水平上得到了证明，同时伴随着条件性负性效价更显著的降低。消退的变化并非由于对条件刺激（CS）的总体情绪反应性降低。此外，在后续的持续消退阶段，向参与者说明虚假阳性反馈并不会影响对已消退的条件反应的处理。我们的结果表明，自我效能感认知的积极变化可能有利于情绪学习。我们结合旨在在基于暴露的治疗过程中增强消退学习的策略对研究结果进行了讨论。
