Cho Hyein, Likhtik Ekaterina, Dennis-Tiwary Tracy A
Department of Psychology, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Psychology, Hunter College, The City University of New York, 695 Park Avenue, HN636, New York, NY, 10065, USA.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2021 Feb;21(1):1-13. doi: 10.3758/s13415-020-00855-9. Epub 2021 Jan 9.
Overgeneralized fear (OGF), or indiscriminate fear responses to signals of threat and nonthreat, is a well-studied cognitive mechanism in human anxiety. Anxiety-related OGF has been studied primarily through fear-learning paradigms and conceptualized as overly exaggerated learning of cues signaling imminent threat. However, the role of safety learning in OGF has not only received much less empirical attention but has been fundamentally conceptualized as learning about the absence of threat rather than the presence of safety. As a result, the relative contributions of exaggerated fear learning and weakened safety learning to anxiety-related OGF remain poorly understood, as do the potentially unique biological and behavioral underpinnings of safety learning. The present review outlines these gaps by, first, summarizing animal and human research on safety learning related to anxiety and OGF. Second, we outline innovations in methods to tease apart unique biological and behavioral contributions of safety learning to OGF. Lastly, we describe clinical and treatment implications of this framework for translational research relevant to human anxiety.
过度泛化恐惧（OGF），即对威胁和非威胁信号的不加区分的恐惧反应，是人类焦虑中一种经过充分研究的认知机制。与焦虑相关的OGF主要通过恐惧学习范式进行研究，并被概念化为对预示即将来临威胁的线索的过度夸张学习。然而，安全学习在OGF中的作用不仅受到的实证关注少得多，而且从根本上被概念化为对威胁不存在的学习，而不是对安全存在的学习。因此，夸张的恐惧学习和减弱的安全学习对与焦虑相关的OGF的相对贡献仍然知之甚少，安全学习潜在的独特生物学和行为基础也是如此。本综述首先通过总结与焦虑和OGF相关的安全学习的动物和人类研究，概述了这些差距。其次，我们概述了区分安全学习对OGF的独特生物学和行为贡献的方法创新。最后，我们描述了这一框架对与人类焦虑相关的转化研究的临床和治疗意义。
