Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2024 Jan 22;19(1). doi: 10.1093/scan/nsae002.
Recent work has demonstrated that reminders of those we are closest to have a unique combination of effects on fear learning and represent a new category of fear inhibitors, termed prepared fear suppressors. Notably, social-support-figure images have been shown to resist becoming associated with fear, suppress conditional-fear-responding and lead to long-term fear reduction. Due to the novelty of this category, understanding the underlying neural mechanisms that support these unique abilities of social-support-reminders has yet to be investigated. Here, we examined the neural correlates that enable social-support-reminders to resist becoming associated with fear during a retardation-of-acquisition test. We found that social-support-figure-images (vs stranger-images) were less readily associated with fear, replicating prior work, and that this effect was associated with decreased amygdala activity and increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) activity for social-support-figure-images (vs stranger-images), suggesting that social-support-engagement of the VMPFC and consequent inhibition of the amygdala may contribute to unique their inhibitory effects. Connectivity analyses supported this interpretation, showing greater connectivity between the VMPFC and left amygdala for social-support-figure-images (vs stranger-images).
最近的研究表明，与我们最亲近的人的提醒对恐惧学习有独特的组合影响，代表了一种新的恐惧抑制剂类别，称为预备性恐惧抑制物。值得注意的是，社会支持人物图像已被证明不易与恐惧相关联，抑制条件性恐惧反应，并导致长期恐惧减少。由于这个类别具有新颖性，因此尚未研究支持社会支持提醒这些独特能力的潜在神经机制。在这里，我们研究了在获得延缓测试中，支持社会支持提醒物与恐惧不易相关联的神经相关性。我们发现，社会支持人物图像（与陌生人图像相比）不太容易与恐惧相关联，这与之前的研究结果一致，并且这种效果与杏仁核活动减少和腹内侧前额叶皮层（VMPFC）活动增加有关，表明 VMPFC 的社会支持参与和随之而来的杏仁核抑制可能有助于其抑制作用的独特性。连接分析支持了这一解释，表明 VMPFC 与左侧杏仁核之间的连接对于社会支持人物图像（与陌生人图像相比）更强。
