D'Agostini Martina, Vanden Bossche Lucas, Burger Andreas M, Van Diest Ilse
Research Group Health Psychology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Emotion Cognition Lab, USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Psychophysiology. 2025 Jan;62(1):e14754. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14754.
Transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) has been tested as a strategy to facilitate fear extinction learning based on the hypothesis that taVNS increases central noradrenergic activity. Four studies out of six found taVNS to enhance extinction learning especially at the beginning of extinction. Facilitatory effects of taVNS were mainly observed in US expectancy, less in fear-potentiated startle (FPS), and not in the skin conductance response (SCR). Suboptimal stimulation parameters may explain the reported mixed results. Also, variability in selected fear conditioning paradigms and statistical power impedes the comparability between studies. This study sought to further test whether taVNS accelerates fear extinction learning as indexed by US expectancy, FPS, and SCR. Similar to most previous studies, we employed a differential fear conditioning paradigm. The left ear of 79 healthy participants was stimulated with either sham (earlobe) or taVNS (cymba concha) during extinction learning. To maximize the beneficial effects of taVNS, the stimulation of the left cymba concha was administered continuously at the maximum level below the pain threshold. Results of the pre-registered frequentist and exploratory Bayesian analyses indicate that taVNS did not accelerate extinction learning in any of the outcomes. The null results indicate that taVNS with commonly used stimulation parameters does not reliably optimize fear extinction learning. More research is needed to test if the stimulation protocol determines the efficacy of taVNS in optimizing fear extinction learning.
经皮耳迷走神经刺激(taVNS)已被作为一种促进恐惧消退学习的策略进行测试,其基于taVNS会增加中枢去甲肾上腺素能活性的假设。六项研究中有四项发现taVNS能增强消退学习,尤其是在消退开始时。taVNS的促进作用主要在预期结果中观察到,在恐惧增强惊吓反应(FPS)中较少观察到,而在皮肤电导反应(SCR)中未观察到。次优的刺激参数可能解释了所报道的混合结果。此外,所选恐惧条件范式的变异性和统计功效阻碍了研究之间的可比性。本研究旨在进一步测试taVNS是否能加速恐惧消退学习,以预期结果、FPS和SCR为指标。与大多数先前研究类似,我们采用了差异恐惧条件范式。在消退学习期间,对79名健康参与者的左耳进行假刺激(耳垂)或taVNS(耳甲艇)刺激。为了使taVNS的有益效果最大化,在低于疼痛阈值的最大水平连续刺激左耳甲艇。预先注册的频率学派和探索性贝叶斯分析结果表明,taVNS在任何结果中都没有加速消退学习。无效结果表明,常用刺激参数的taVNS不能可靠地优化恐惧消退学习。需要更多研究来测试刺激方案是否决定了taVNS在优化恐惧消退学习中的疗效。
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