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TOWARD AN ACCOUNT OF CLINICAL ANXIETY PREDICATED ON BASIC, NEURALLY MAPPED MECHANISMS OF P AVLOVIAN FEAR‐LEARNING: THE CASE FOR CONDITIONED OVERGENERALIZATION
Author(s) -
Lissek Shmuel
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
depression and anxiety
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.634
H-Index - 129
eISSN - 1520-6394
pISSN - 1091-4269
DOI - 10.1002/da.21922
Subject(s) - anxiety , psychology , panic disorder , generalized anxiety disorder , fear conditioning , generalization , panic , neuroscience , fear potentiated startle , specific phobia , anxiety disorder , amygdala , classical conditioning , cognitive psychology , clinical psychology , psychiatry , conditioning , mathematical analysis , statistics , mathematics
The past two decades have brought dramatic progress in the neuroscience of anxiety due, in no small part, to animal findings specifying the neurobiology of P avlovian fear‐conditioning. Fortuitously, this neurally mapped process of fear learning is widely expressed in humans, and has been centrally implicated in the etiology of clinical anxiety. Fear‐conditioning experiments in anxiety patients thus represent a unique opportunity to bring recent advances in animal neuroscience to bear on working, brain‐based models of clinical anxiety. The current presentation details the neural basis and clinical relevance of fear conditioning, and highlights generalization of conditioned fear to stimuli resembling the conditioned danger cue as one of the more robust conditioning markers of clinical anxiety. Studies testing such generalization across a variety of anxiety disorders (panic, generalized anxiety disorder, and social anxiety disorder) with systematic methods developed in animals will next be presented. Finally, neural accounts of overgeneralization deriving from animal and human data will be described with emphasis given to implications for the neurobiology and treatment of clinical anxiety .