Institute of Psychology, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
Psychophysiology. 2022 Mar;59(3):e13971. doi: 10.1111/psyp.13971. Epub 2021 Nov 18.
Return of fear may be prevented by post-retrieval extinction (PRE), a procedure consisting of presenting a stimulus that was present during conditioning (retrieval cue) prior to extinction training. However, recent evidence suggests that there might be circumstances under which PRE is not effective to prevent the return of fear (boundary conditions), but some of these conditions remain unknown. We explored if rehearsing the CS, US or CS-US contingency during the interval between the retrieval cue and extinction training might change the effects of PRE. One day after differential fear conditioning, healthy human participants (n = 83) underwent either standard extinction (control condition, n = 31) or two different PRE procedures, one in which participants rehearsed the CS-US contingency during the interval between the retrieval cue and extinction (rehearsal condition, n = 25), or another in which they underwent a verbal fluency task directing their attention away from the experimental contingencies during this interval (nonrehearsal condition, n = 27). Return of fear in a reinstatement test was observed in both control and rehearsal conditions, whereas in the nonrehearsal condition there was a generalized increase in response to the CS+ and CS-. Differential response in the rehearsal condition had values slightly smaller than the control group with no significant differences from both control and nonrehearsal conditions. These results suggest that the overt behavior of participants during the interval between a retrieval cue and extinction training might change the effects of PRE in healthy human participants, but further manipulations of these variables are needed to confirm these findings.
恐惧的回归可以通过提取后消退（PRE）来预防，该程序包括在消退训练之前呈现条件作用期间存在的刺激（提取线索）。然而，最近的证据表明，在某些情况下，PRE 可能无法有效地预防恐惧的回归（边界条件），但其中一些条件尚不清楚。我们探讨了在提取线索和消退训练之间的间隔期间，对 CS、US 或 CS-US 连续性进行排练是否会改变 PRE 的效果。在差异恐惧条件作用后一天，健康人类参与者（n=83）接受了标准消退（对照组，n=31）或两种不同的 PRE 程序之一，其中一种程序在提取线索和消退训练之间的间隔期间排练 CS-US 连续性（排练条件，n=25），另一种程序则在该间隔期间进行了口头流畅性任务，将注意力从实验连续性上转移开（非排练条件，n=27）。在重新呈现测试中，在对照组和排练条件下都观察到了恐惧的回归，而在非排练条件下，对 CS+和 CS-的反应普遍增加。排练条件下的差异反应值略小于对照组，但与对照组和非排练条件均无显著差异。这些结果表明，参与者在提取线索和消退训练之间的间隔期间的外显行为可能会改变健康人类参与者中 PRE 的效果，但需要进一步操纵这些变量来证实这些发现。
