The temporal course of over-generalized conditioned threat expectancies in posttraumatic stress disorder.
Behav Res Ther
; 124: 103513, 2020 01.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-31864116
ABSTRACT
One key conditioning abnormality in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is heightened generalization of fear from a conditioned danger-cue (CS+) to similarly appearing safe stimuli. The present work represents the first effort to track the time-course of heightened generalization in PTSD with the prediction of heightened PTSD-related over-generalization in earlier but not later trials. This prediction derives from past discriminative fear-conditioning studies providing incidental evidence that over-generalization in PTSD may be reduced with sufficient learning trials. In the current study, we re-analyzed previously published conditioned fear-generalization data (Kaczkurkin et al., 2017) including combat veterans with PTSD (nâ¯=â¯15) or subthreshold PTSD (SubPTSD nâ¯=â¯18), and trauma controls (TC n = 19). This re-analysis aimed to identify the trial-by-trial course of group differences in generalized perceived risk across three classes of safe generalization stimuli (GSs) parametrically varying in similarity to a CS+ paired with shock. Those with PTSD and SubPTSD, relative to TC, displayed significantly elevated generalization to all GSs combined in early but not late generalization trials. Additionally, over-generalization in PTSD and SubPTSD persisted across trials to a greater extent for classes of GSs bearing higher resemblance to CS+. Such results suggest that PTSD-related over-generalization of conditioned threat expectancies can be reduced with sufficient exposure to unreinforced GSs and accentuate the importance of analyzing trial-by-trial changes when assessing over-generalization in clinical populations.
Palavras-chave
Texto completo:
1
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Transtornos de Estresse Pós-Traumáticos
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Veteranos
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Condicionamento Clássico
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Extinção Psicológica
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Generalização Psicológica
Tipo de estudo:
Prognostic_studies
Limite:
Humans
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Male
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2020
Tipo de documento:
Article