Recent meta-analyses indicated differences in fear acquisition and extinction between patients with anxiety-related disorders and comparison subjects. However, these effects are small and may hold for only a subsample of patients. To investigate individual trajectories in fear acquisition and extinction across patients with anxiety-related disorders (N = 104; before treatment) and comparison subjects (N = 93), data from a previous study (Duits et al., 2017) were re-analyzed using data-driven latent class growth analyses. In this explorative study, subjective fear ratings, shock expectancy ratings and startle responses were used as outcome measures. Fear and expectancy ratings, but not startle data, yielded distinct fear conditioning trajectories across participants. Patients were, compared to controls, overrepresented in two distinct dysfunctional fear conditioning trajectories: impaired safety learning and poor fear extinction to danger cues. The profiling of individual patterns allowed to determine that whereas a subset of patients showed trajectories of dysfunctional fear conditioning, a significant proportion of patients (≥50 %) did not. The strength of trajectory analyses as opposed to group analyses is that it allows the identification of individuals with dysfunctional fear conditioning. Results suggested that dysfunctional fear learning may also be associated with poor treatment outcome, but further research in larger samples is needed to address this question.

最近的荟萃分析表明，焦虑相关疾病患者和比较对象在恐惧获得和消亡方面存在差异。但是，这些影响很小，可能仅对部分患者有效。调查焦虑相关疾病患者（N = 104；治疗前）和比较对象（N= 93），使用数据驱动的潜在类增长分析重新分析了先前研究的数据（Duits等，2017）。在这项探索性研究中，主观恐惧等级，休克期望等级和惊吓反应被用作结果指标。恐惧和期望等级，但没有令人吃惊的数据，在参与者之间产生了不同的恐惧调节轨迹。与对照组相比，患者表现出两种截然不同的恐惧条件调理轨迹：安全学习受损和对危险线索的恐惧消退不佳。通过对个体模式的分析可以确定，尽管一部分患者显示出功能障碍恐惧调节的轨迹，但相当一部分患者（≥50％）没有。与小组分析相比，轨迹分析的优势在于它可以识别出功能障碍恐惧条件不佳的人。结果表明，功能障碍性恐惧学习也可能与治疗效果差有关，但需要在更大样本中进行进一步研究才能解决该问题。