Background and objectives

Attention plays an important role in the treatment of anxiety. Increased attention to threat has been shown to yield improved treatment outcomes in anxious patients following exposure-based therapy. This study examined whether increasing attention to learned stimuli during fear extinction, an experimental analogue for exposure-based treatments, could improve extinction learning and its maintenance.

Methods

Sixty-five healthy adults were randomized into experimental or control conditions. All completed a differential fear conditioning task. During extinction, a subtle attentional manipulation was implemented in the experimental group, designed to increase participants’ attention to both threat and safety cues. Three days later, an extinction recall test was conducted using the original cues and two perceptually similar morphs.

Results

Fear conditioning was achieved in both behavioral and psychophysiological measures. In addition, between-group differences emerged during extinction. The experimental group exhibited increased attention to stimuli and lower fear responses in physiological measure than the control group. Similarly, during extinction recall, the experimental group exhibited lower startle responses than the control group. Last, across groups, attending to the safety cue during extinction was associated with lower self-reported risk of the two generalization morphs displayed during extinction recall.

Limitations

Skin conductance response (SCR) was not measured during extinction recall. Future research should include both SCR and additional generalization morphs so as to allow for the examination of more subtle individual differences.

Conclusions

Results indicate that the attentional manipulation increased attention allocation to stimuli during extinction; this, in turn, affected fear-related physiological response.

中文翻译：

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增加对威胁和安全刺激的注意力分配对恐惧消退及其回忆的影响

背景和目标

注意力在焦虑症的治疗中起着重要作用。在接受基于暴露的治疗的焦虑患者中，增加对威胁的关注已被证明可以改善治疗结果。这项研究检查了在恐惧消退期间增加对习得刺激的关注是否可以改善消退学习及其维持。

方法

65 名健康成人随机分为实验条件或对照条件。所有人都完成了差异恐惧条件反射任务。在灭绝期间，在实验组中实施了微妙的注意力操纵，旨在增加参与者对威胁和安全提示的注意力。三天后，使用原始线索和两个感知上相似的变体进行了灭绝回忆测试。

结果

在行为和心理生理学措施中都实现了恐惧条件反射。此外，在灭绝期间出现了组间差异。与对照组相比，实验组在生理测量中表现出对刺激的更多关注和更低的恐惧反应。同样，在灭绝回忆期间，实验组的惊吓反应低于对照组。最后，跨组，在灭绝期间注意安全提示与在灭绝回忆期间显示的两种泛化形态的较低自我报告风险相关。

限制

在灭绝召回期间未测量皮肤电导反应 (SCR)。未来的研究应该包括 SCR 和额外的泛化变形，以便检查更细微的个体差异。

结论

结果表明，在灭绝过程中，注意力操纵增加了对刺激的注意力分配；这反过来又影响了与恐惧相关的生理反应。