Exploring Fear Conditioning and Extinction in Mental Health

Fear Extinction versus Fear Conditioning

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The Clinical Applications of Fear Conditioning and Extinction

Fear conditioning is a skill that is essential for detecting danger, commencing self-defensive systems, and ensuring a species’ survival. In contrast, Fear extinction reduces conditioned fear reactions after extinction training, which involves repeatedly presenting conditioned stimuli to participants. Disorders in humans related to heightened anxiety and dread, such as phobias, posttraumatic stress disorder, and panic disorder, show how mistaken fear training can make previously harmless stimuli fear-inducing and very dangerous. Furthermore, in many illnesses, getting rid of these links is impeded. The social and clinical importance of fear conditioning and extinction is exhibited by the lower lifetime occurrence of anxiety disorders (Cooper et al., 2018).

Fear conditioning has ascertained to be a very reliable, quick, and precise experimental procedure for researching and analyzing the neural substrates of fear. Fear extinction is most likely the principal therapeutic constituent of exposure-based psychotherapies. Fear conditioning and extinction in animals and humans have been studied extensively, resulting in the invention of a core brain network involved in activity and extinction (Spix et al., 2021). Over several decades, researchers have identified brain areas and circuits involved in fear conditioning and extinction (Ramanathan & Maren, 2019)

Fear conditioning promotes spine elimination in the frontal association cortex, while fear extinction causes spine creation in layer five pyramidal neurons in the motor cortex. On the other hand, fear conditioning and extinction decrease and increase the activity of these neurons, respectively (Xu et al., 2019). Fear conditioning and extinction in the primary motor cortex, a cortical region critical for acquiring and extinction of auditory-cued conditioned freezing reflexes, appear to cause opposing alterations in layer five pyramidal neurons’ synaptic connections and bodily activity. Rear conditioning and fear extinction is, therefore, a crucial clinical tool in Nursing.

References

Cooper, S. E., Grillon, C., & Lissek, S. (2018). Impaired discriminative fear conditioning during later training trials differentiates generalized anxiety disorder, not a panic disorder, from healthy control participants. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 85, 84–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comppsych.2018.07.001

Ramanathan, K. R., & Maren, S. (2019). Nucleus reuniens mediates the extinction of contextual fear conditioning. Behavioral Brain Research, 374, 112114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112114

Spix, M., Lommen, M. J., & Boddez, Y. (2021). Deleting “fear” from “fear extinction”: Estimating the individual extinction rate via non-aversive conditioning. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 142, 103869. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2021.103869

Xu, Z., Adler, A., Li, H., Pérez-Cuesta, L. M., Lai, B., Li, W., & Gan, W. B. (2019). Fear conditioning and extinction induce opposing changes in dendritic spine remodeling and bodily activity of layer five pyramidal neurons in the mouse motor cortex. Scientific Reports, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40549-y