Reinstatement of conditioned fear in humans is context dependent and impaired in amnesia.
Journal Article (Journal Article)
A contextual reinstatement procedure was developed to assess the contributions of environmental cues and hippocampal function in the recovery of conditioned fear following extinction in humans. Experiment 1 showed context specificity in the recovery of extinguished skin conductance responses after presentations of an auditory unconditioned stimulus. Experiment 2 demonstrated that fear recovery did not generalize to an explicitly unpaired conditioned stimulus. Experiment 3 replicated the context dependency of fear recovery with a shock as an unconditioned stimulus. Two amnesic patients failed to recover fear responses following reinstatement in the same context, despite showing initial fear acquisition. These results extend the known functions of the human hippocampus and highlight the importance of environmental contexts in regulating the expression of latent fear associations.
Full Text
Duke Authors
Cited Authors
- LaBar, KS; Phelps, EA
Published Date
- June 2005
Published In
Volume / Issue
- 119 / 3
Start / End Page
- 677 - 686
PubMed ID
- 15998188
Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)
- 1939-0084
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
- 0735-7044
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
- 10.1037/0735-7044.119.3.677
Language
- eng