School of Psychological Sciences and the Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center, University of Haifa, Abba Hushi 199, Mt Carmel, Haifa, Israel.
Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neuroscience, King's College, London, UK.
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2021 Sep;72:101640. doi: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2021.101640. Epub 2021 Feb 11.
Attention plays an important role in the treatment of anxiety. Increased attention to threat has been shown to yield improved treatment outcomes in anxious patients following exposure-based therapy. This study examined whether increasing attention to learned stimuli during fear extinction, an experimental analogue for exposure-based treatments, could improve extinction learning and its maintenance.
Sixty-five healthy adults were randomized into experimental or control conditions. All completed a differential fear conditioning task. During extinction, a subtle attentional manipulation was implemented in the experimental group, designed to increase participants' attention to both threat and safety cues. Three days later, an extinction recall test was conducted using the original cues and two perceptually similar morphs.
Fear conditioning was achieved in both behavioral and psychophysiological measures. In addition, between-group differences emerged during extinction. The experimental group exhibited increased attention to stimuli and lower fear responses in physiological measure than the control group. Similarly, during extinction recall, the experimental group exhibited lower startle responses than the control group. Last, across groups, attending to the safety cue during extinction was associated with lower self-reported risk of the two generalization morphs displayed during extinction recall.
Skin conductance response (SCR) was not measured during extinction recall. Future research should include both SCR and additional generalization morphs so as to allow for the examination of more subtle individual differences.
Results indicate that the attentional manipulation increased attention allocation to stimuli during extinction; this, in turn, affected fear-related physiological response.
注意力在焦虑症的治疗中起着重要作用。研究表明，在基于暴露的治疗后，增加对威胁的注意力可以改善焦虑患者的治疗效果。本研究旨在探讨在恐惧消退过程中增加对习得性刺激的注意力，是否可以改善消退学习及其维持。
65 名健康成年人被随机分为实验组和对照组。所有参与者均完成了差异恐惧条件反射任务。在消退过程中，实验组实施了一种微妙的注意力操纵，旨在增加参与者对威胁和安全线索的注意力。三天后，使用原始线索和两个感知相似的变体进行了消退回忆测试。
在行为和生理测量中都实现了恐惧条件反射。此外，在消退过程中出现了组间差异。实验组在注意力和生理指标上的恐惧反应均低于对照组。同样，在消退回忆中，实验组的惊跳反应低于对照组。最后，在整个组中，在消退过程中注意安全线索与在消退回忆中显示的两个泛化变体的自我报告风险较低相关。
在消退回忆期间未测量皮肤电导反应（SCR）。未来的研究应包括 SCR 和其他的泛化变体，以允许更细微的个体差异的检验。
结果表明，注意力操纵增加了消退过程中对刺激的注意力分配；这反过来又影响了与恐惧相关的生理反应。
