Department of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Graduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA.
Neuroscientist. 2020 Feb;26(1):43-56. doi: 10.1177/1073858419866820. Epub 2019 Aug 5.
Emotional responses are not static but change as a consequence of learning. Organisms adapt to emotional events and these adaptations influence the way we think, behave, and feel when we encounter similar situations in the future. Integrating recent work from rodent models and research on human psychopathology, this article lays out a model describing how affective events cause learning and can lead to anxiety and depression: affective events are linked to conditioned stimuli and contexts. Affective experiences entrain oscillatory synchrony across distributed neural circuits, including the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens, which form associations that constitute the basis of emotional memories. Consolidation of these experiences appears to be supported by replay in the hippocampus-a process by which hippocampal firing patterns recreate the firing pattern that occurred previously. Generalization of learning occurs to never before experienced contexts when associations form across distinct but related conditioned stimuli. The process of generalization, which requires cortical structures, can cause memories to become abstracted. During abstraction, the latent, overlapping features of the learned associations remain and result in the formation of schemas. Schemas are adaptive because they facilitate the rapid processing of conditioned stimuli and prime behavioral, cognitive, and affective responses that are the manifestations of the accumulation of an individual's conditioned experiences. However, schemas can be maladaptive when the generalization of aversive emotional responses are applied to stimuli and contexts in which affective reactions are unnecessary. I describe how this process can lead to not only mood and anxiety disorders but also psychotherapeutic treatment.
情绪反应不是静态的，而是会随着学习而变化。生物体会适应情绪事件，这些适应会影响我们在未来遇到类似情况时的思维、行为和感受方式。本文整合了来自啮齿动物模型和人类心理病理学研究的最新工作，提出了一个模型，描述了情感事件如何引起学习，并可能导致焦虑和抑郁：情感事件与条件刺激和情境相关联。情感体验在包括前额叶皮层、海马体、杏仁核和伏隔核在内的分布式神经回路中引起振荡同步，这些回路形成了构成情绪记忆基础的关联。这些经验的巩固似乎得到了海马体重放的支持——海马体的放电模式重现先前发生的放电模式的过程。当关联形成于不同但相关的条件刺激之间时，从未经历过的情境中会发生学习的泛化。泛化过程需要皮质结构，它会导致记忆变得抽象。在抽象过程中，学习关联的潜在、重叠特征仍然存在，导致图式的形成。图式是适应性的，因为它们促进了条件刺激的快速处理，并引发了行为、认知和情感反应的启动，这些反应是个体条件经验积累的表现。然而，当对不必要的情绪反应的条件刺激和情境进行负面情绪反应的泛化时，图式可能会变得适应不良。我描述了这个过程如何不仅导致情绪和焦虑障碍，还导致心理治疗。
