It has been suggested that relapse after exposure therapy for social anxiety disorder is related to the renewal effect. This study aimed to investigate whether the renewal effect occurs in fear conditioning utilizing social stimuli and the quantitative predictions obtained by the Rescorla-Wagner and Bouton’s model using Bayesian modeling fit their data. A total of 63 students participated in this study and received differential fear conditioning, extinction, and testing. For participants in Group AAA, a single context (context A) was used during all the phases. For those in Group ABA, the acquisition and test phases were conducted in the same context (context A), whereas the extinction phase was completed differently (context B). This experiment revealed that the renewal effect was observed in the expectancy rating, but not the valence rating. Bayesian modeling demonstrated that both predictions were generally consistent with the data. These results suggest that relapse of social anxiety is related with the renewal effect in Pavlovian fear conditioning. These findings might provide some implications for the improvement of exposure therapy.

已经提出，暴露疗法对于社交焦虑症的复发与更新效果有关。这项研究的目的是调查更新恐惧效应是否在利用社会刺激的条件下发生，Rescorla-Wagner和Bouton模型使用贝叶斯模型获得的定量预测符合他们的数据。共有63名学生参加了这项研究，并接受了不同的恐惧条件，消光和测试。对于AAA组的参与者，在所有阶段都使用了单个上下文（上下文A）。对于ABA组中的那些，采集和测试阶段在相同的环境下进行（背景A），而灭绝阶段则以不同的方式完成（背景B）。该实验表明，在预期等级中观察到了更新效果，但在化合价中没有观察到。贝叶斯模型表明，这两个预测通常与数据一致。这些结果表明，社交焦虑症的复发与巴甫洛夫式恐惧条件的更新效果有关。这些发现可能为暴露疗法的改善提供一些启示。