University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Department of Systems Neuroscience, Hamburg, Germany; Maastricht University, Research Group Experimental Health Psychology, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Department of Systems Neuroscience, Hamburg, Germany.
Behav Res Ther. 2023 Mar;162:104256. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2023.104256. Epub 2023 Jan 20.
Context is crucial in guiding behavior in an ever-changing world and contextual information plays a crucial role in associative learning processes. For instance, the return of fear (RoF) after successful extinction, which is used to study the mechanisms underlying relapse phenomena in fear- and stress-related disorders in an experimental model, is known to be context dependent as evident from phenomena such as renewal (contextual change) and reinstatement (re-exposure to an aversive event). Human adaptions of reinstatement paradigms have resulted in mixed findings: CS specific as well as unspecific RoF or unexpected "reinstated" conditioned responding in no reinstatement US control groups. Here, we systematically investigate the role of context (i.e., cue-context compound) on reinstatement-induced RoF in a human differential fear conditioning paradigm using subjective and psychophysiological measures in a large sample (N = 212) including reinstatement and control groups. Overall, response patterns in reinstatement-groups mirrored results from single-cue rodent work. Yet, only generalized, not differential RoF was observed. Remarkably, depending on outcome measure RoF was also observed under identical experimental context conditions without US-re-exposure, underlining effects of contextual change beyond the reinstatement-US and challenging reinstatement research in human subjects and highlight that future reinstatement work should focus on the operationalization of context.
在不断变化的世界中，语境对于指导行为至关重要，而语境信息在联想学习过程中起着至关重要的作用。例如，恐惧的返回（RoF）在成功的消退后出现，这被用来研究恐惧和与压力相关的障碍中复发现象的机制，这是依赖于语境的，这一点从更新（语境变化）和恢复（重新暴露于厌恶事件）等现象中可以明显看出。对恢复范式的人类适应导致了混合的发现：条件刺激特异性和非特异性 RoF 或在没有恢复 US 对照组中意外的“恢复”条件反应。在这里，我们在一个大样本（N=212）中，包括恢复组和对照组，使用主观和心理生理测量，在人类差异恐惧条件作用范式中系统地研究了语境（即线索-语境复合物）对恢复诱导的 RoF 的作用。总体而言，恢复组的反应模式反映了单线索啮齿动物研究的结果。然而，只观察到了一般的 RoF，而不是差异的 RoF。值得注意的是，根据结果测量，即使在没有 US 重新暴露的情况下，在相同的实验语境条件下也观察到了 RoF，这强调了除了恢复-US 之外的语境变化的影响，这对人类受试者的恢复研究提出了挑战，并强调未来的恢复工作应该侧重于语境的操作化。
