Inspiring fear: The effects of respiratory phase on the learning, generalization and persistence of fear

Understanding how fear develops is crucial for promoting anxiety treatments. Pavlovian conditioning can offer insights into fear learning, as well as the generalization and persistence of fear, however there is still a large variability in individual learning trajectories. Recent research shows that attention, perception and memory processes play a role in this variability, but an important and still ignored factor is the bodily state during fear learning. Neuroscientific research points to breathing as a unique bodily rhythm, modulating brain activity across (sub)cortical regions. From these studies, it has emerged that inhalation phase of the respiratory cycle promotes attentional orienting towards external stimuli, yet no research has attempted to harness this effect to promote learning. This project will address this gap via three experimental studies, each tackling a distinct fear conditioning aspect (initial learning, fear generalization, fear extinction). We will, for the first time, investigate (1) if presenting fear cues during inhalation vs. exhalation affects fear learning, and (2) which cognitive and neural processes are relevant for this relationship. In a fourth study, we will pool the data to more precisely investigate how breathing modulates brain oscillations during fear learning. This novel and ambitious project has high potential to illuminate the brain-body interactions in fear learning, thus opening new avenues for clinical research and application.