“Implanting” a fear memory in the human mind: A new approach for fear generalization

For nearly a century, classical Pavlovian conditioning has been used to study fear learning and generalization, with the aim of understanding the origins and maintenance of anxiety disorders in humans. As humans, however, we have a unique linguistic or semantic memory system to represent the past, and the classical conditioning approach has largely ignored how people’s existing semantic memory associations (e.g., dog - doghouse) can uniquely impact fear generalization (e.g., from dog to doghouse). Previous research, including my own, has demonstrated that semantic memory associations can lead to false memories. When a false memory of a fear experience is formed, overgeneralization of fear may happen. Therefore, individual differences in the susceptibility to develop false memories might feed into the propensity for overgeneralization, which is a risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders. Building on my previous work, I will implement a false memory paradigm into a fear conditioning protocol to create false fear memories and to investigate fear generalization via existing semantic memory associations.

Keywords:false memory, fear conditioning, semantic memory association, spreading activation

Disciplines:Human experimental psychology not elsewhere classified