Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
NEW RESEARCHFear Conditioning in Adolescents With Anxiety Disorders: Results From a Novel Experimental Paradigm
Section snippets
Participants
Sixteen medication-free adolescents with DSM-IV anxiety disorders and 38 healthy adolescents were recruited for the present study through local schools and newspapers (Table 1). This sample size has 75% power to detect group differences with effect sizes of at least 0.80. All of the anxious subjects completed comprehensive clinical assessments on the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia17) conducted by clinicians trained to exhibit acceptable reliability (κ >.75). All of the
Sample Characteristics
Table 1 presents demographic characteristics of the 16 patients and 38 healthy subjects. Groups did not differ on age (t52 = 1.64; p = not significant (n.s.), sex (X2 =.95; p = n.s.), socioeconomic status (t52 = 0.68; p = n.s.), or intelligence (t50 = 0.79; p = n.s.). No significant differences between males and females emerged in fear ratings to either the CS+ or CS− following visit 1 or 2. Older adolescents reported significantly lower fear ratings to the CS+ stimulus at visit 1 (r = −0.30; p
DISCUSSION
Four key findings emerged from our study. First, the current paradigm produced strong levels of differential conditioning, manifested as higher ratings to the CS+ relative to the CS− across all of the subjects. Second, in the context of similar levels of differential learning, overall fear collapsed across CS types was higher among anxious patients than healthy subjects. Furthermore, significant positive correlations between self-reported and parent-reported anxiety symptom scores and fear
REFERENCES (29)
Context, ambiguity, and unlearning: sources of relapse after behavioral extinction
Biol Psychiatry
(2002)Associative learning deficits increase symptoms of anxiety in humans
Biol Psychiatry
(2002)- et al.
Classical fear conditioning in the anxiety disorders: a meta-analysis
Behav Res Ther
(2005) - et al.
Evidence for retarded extinction of aversive learning in anxious children
Behav Res Ther
(2006) - et al.
Fear-potentiated startle in adolescent offspring of parents with anxiety disorders
Biol Psychiatry
(1998) - et al.
Families at high and low risk for depression: a three-generation startle study
Biol Psychiatry
(2005) - et al.
Airpuff startle probes: an efficacious and less aversive alternative to white-noise
Biol Psychol
(2005) - et al.
K-SADS-PL
J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry
(2000) - et al.
The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED): scale construction and psychometric characteristics
J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry
(1997) - et al.
The development of anxiety: the role of control in the early environment
Psychol Bull
(1998)
Neuroanatomical hypothesis of panic disorder, revised
Am J Psychiatry
Emotion circuits in the brain
Annu Rev Neurosci
Abnormal attention modulation of fear circuit function in pediatric generalized anxiety disorder
Arch Gen Psychiatry
Memory: From Mind to Molecules
Cited by (159)
Behavioral and genetic architecture of fear conditioning and related phenotypes
2023, Neurobiology of Learning and MemoryAnxiety disorders in children and adolescents: A summary and overview of the literature
2023, Behaviour Research and TherapyImpact of observational and direct learning on fear conditioning generalization in humans
2023, Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological PsychiatryOnline counterconditioning with COVID-19-relevant stimuli in lockdown: Impact on threat expectancy, fear, and persistent avoidance
2023, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental PsychiatryFear-potentiated startle reveals diminished threat extinction in pathological anxiety
2023, International Journal of PsychophysiologyRemote, online assessment of avoidance learning
2022, Learning and Motivation
This research was supported by the NIMH/NIH Intramural Research Program. The authors thank the participants and the research staff who facilitated this work.
Disclosure: The authors have no financial relationships to disclose.