Given the enormous individual and societal burden imposed by those conditions 9, 10, 11, a clear insight into the mechanisms that govern acute and chronic defensive activation is important for developing targeted and successful interventions 12. In these cases, the activation is typically more sustained and out of proportion to the actual threat, which gives rise to chronic feelings of apprehension, pervasive avoidance behaviour that interferes with day-to-day functioning, and tonic physiological arousal that leads to accumulated biological wear and tear (allostatic load). However, the same systemic defensive activation that is adaptive and sometimes critical for survival is also centrally implicated in clinical conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive–compulsive disorder 3, 8. Collectively, this activity prepares an individual to cope with threat in a way that is adapted to its perceived imminence 6, 7. They are characterized by activity in a number of loosely correlated response systems 3, 4, 5 that include subjective phenomenological experience (a feeling of dread or apprehension), overt behaviour (aimed at increasing the physical or psychological distance to the threat or decreasing its impending impact, through immobilization or active escape or avoidance) and peripheral and central nervous activation (physiological arousal and muscle tension). This is fear and anxiety in action, mobilizing an evolutionarily conserved defensive machinery to prepare for the possible occurrence (or reoccurrence) of danger.įear and anxiety are closely related, phylogenetically adaptive emotions, experienced in response to a near and imminent threat or a more distant and future threat, respectively 1, 2. Understanding individual differences in each of these phenomena, not only in isolation but also in how they interact, will further strengthen the external validity of the fear conditioning model as a tool with which to study maladaptive fear as it manifests in clinical anxiety.įollowing the experience of a serious car crash at an intersection last month, an individual might feel apprehensive in traffic, get sweaty palms and a racing heart as soon as they even think of getting behind the wheel, and exhibit extra caution when approaching an intersection. In this Perspective, we suggest that fruitful use of Pavlovian fear conditioning as a laboratory model of clinical anxiety requires moving beyond the study of fear acquisition to associated fear conditioning phenomena: fear extinction, generalization of conditioned fear and fearful avoidance. Pavlovian fear conditioning has been the prime research instrument that has led to substantial progress in understanding the multi-faceted psychological and neurobiological mechanisms of fear in past decades. However, fear becomes maladaptive and can give rise to the development of clinical anxiety when it exceeds the degree of threat, generalizes broadly across stimuli and contexts, persists after the danger is gone or promotes excessive avoidance behaviour. Fear is an adaptive emotion that mobilizes defensive resources upon confrontation with danger.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |