Experimental extinction as a laboratory model of exposure: mechanisms of generalization and the role of extinction cues.

Exposure treatment is highly effective in reducing phobic fears in the short term, but relapse into fear after successful treatment is common, evidence of an inability to generalize information learned during treatment to novel situations. Extinction of conditioned fear is generally regarded as a laboratory model for exposure treatment. In a series of human fear conditioning studies, I will investigate whether and how extinction cues (i.e., cues that retrieve the memory for the extinction experience) can help bridge the gap between extinction and later contexts to reduce fear that would otherwise recover. Mechanisms that I will address include familiarity versus novelty of extinction cues, the degree to which cues that resemble trained extinction cues can also act as extinction cues, the circumstances under which an extinction cue will reduce fear to stimuli other than the one with which it was originally trained, and the impact of temporal consistency of extinction cues between training and test. Other mechanisms might also be investigated, time permitting. These experiments are important for reducing relapse after exposure therapy. They illuminate boundary conditions and underlying mechanisms of extinction cues and in general provide information regarding how to make learning generalize more effectively. As such, this research has the dual goal of yielding theoretical progress and providing clues to improve clinical practice.

Keywords:Generalization, Relapse, Exposure, Extinction, Retrieval, Extinction cues

Disciplines:Animal experimental and comparative psychology, Applied psychology, Human experimental psychology