Author:

Keywords:

Social Sciences, Science & Technology, Life Sciences & Biomedicine, Psychology, Clinical, Psychiatry, Psychology, human fear conditioning, extinction, association splitting, counterconditioning, intrusive thinking, anxiety disorders, 1701 Psychology, 5201 Applied and developmental psychology, 5203 Clinical and health psychology, 5205 Social and personality psychology

Abstract:

Human fear conditioning paradigm is a widely-used procedure to study anxiety. However, merely thinking about the aversive outcome is typically not measured in this procedure. This is surprising because thinking of an aversive event is of clinical relevance (e.g., in the form of intrusions) and of theoretical interest. We present two pre-registered studies that (1) included thinking of an aversive outcome as an additional dependent variable and (2) compared several interventions to reduce it. We found that mere thinking of an aversive outcome could be successfully conditioned. Among the participants who showed successful acquisition, extinction training was less successful in reducing it than counterconditioning. Presenting new additional outcomes also proved effective to reduce thoughts about the initial outcome when the new outcomes were positive stimuli. Including thinking of the aversive outcome as an additional dependent variable may serve to enhance the understanding of anxiety-related disorders and inform their treatment.