University of New South Wales, Australia.
University of New South Wales, Australia.
Behav Res Ther. 2020 Feb;125:103535. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2019.103535. Epub 2019 Dec 20.
Two experiments examined whether extinction of a generalization stimulus (GS) after single cue fear conditioning would in turn generalize to other stimuli, relative to a control group that received regular extinction of CS + itself. We found only a weak effect of such "generalization of GS extinction" either back to CS + or to a different GS, on either US expectancy or skin conductance measures. In other words, despite extinction trials with a stimulus highly similar to CS+, participants showed a return of fear when tested with CS + or a novel GS. However this responding declined rapidly over non-reinforced test trials. Trait anxious participants showed higher overall US expectancy ratings in the extinction and test phases, and slower extinction of expectancy, relative to low anxious participants. These results may help explain why exposure therapy, which is unlikely to reproduce the exact stimuli present at acquisition, sometimes fails to transfer to other fear-eliciting stimuli subsequently encountered by anxious clients. The generalization of GS extinction paradigm might provide a useful testbed for evaluation of interventions designed to enhance transfer, such as exposure to multiple diverse exemplars.
两项实验考察了在单一线索恐惧条件作用后，GS 的消退是否会相对于仅接受 CS+自身常规消退的对照组，转而泛化到其他刺激物。我们发现，这种“GS 消退的泛化”对 US 预期或皮肤电导率的测量，无论是回到 CS+还是不同的 GS，只有微弱的影响。换句话说，尽管有与 CS+非常相似的刺激物进行消退试验，但当用 CS+或新的 GS 进行测试时，参与者表现出恐惧的回归。然而，这种反应在无强化的测试试验中迅速下降。特质焦虑参与者在消退和测试阶段的 US 预期评分总体较高，相对于低焦虑参与者，他们的预期消退速度较慢。这些结果可能有助于解释为什么暴露疗法不太可能重现获得时存在的确切刺激物，有时却无法转移到随后焦虑患者遇到的其他引发恐惧的刺激物。GS 消退泛化范式可能为评估旨在增强转移的干预措施提供一个有用的试验台，例如暴露于多个不同的范例。
