Browsing by Subject "fear generalization"

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    Deciding Which Fears to Face: Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms of Costly Avoidance in Clinical Anxiety
    (2022-07) Berg, Hannah
    Clinical anxiety is often characterized by a behavioral pattern of relinquishing rewards in order to avoid potential threats, a decision-making bias that confers substantial functional impairment. However, the mechanisms of such costly avoidance have received scant attention in the literature. The present work addresses this gap, applying fear-conditioning methodology and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to probe the neural and psychological processes contributing to costly avoidance. A sample of 153 adults with and without clinical anxiety underwent fMRI while completing a fear-conditioning and generalization paradigm in which participants decide between risky approach and costly avoidance. Anxious individuals were more likely than others to make costly, unnecessary avoidance decisions in the context of generalized Pavlovian fear, as has been seen previously. Subsequent analyses provide novel insights into this finding. When assessing risk and reward appraisals, anxious individuals demonstrated a greater likelihood of avoidance in the context of moderate expected risk or low expected reward. Brain-wide correlations and multivariate pattern analyses revealed that neural activity during choice deliberation in regions associated with cognitive control, sensory processing, and perception-motor integration scaled with risk and reward appraisals and was predictive of choice. Among anxious individuals, however, these neural processes were less correlated with expected risk and were less predictive of choice, suggesting that the observed avoidance bias may stem from a relatively weak formation of a prepotent approach response, and for a tendency to second-guess or ignore the results of deliberative valuation. Taken together, the present findings represent a significant advance in the conceptualization of costly avoidance in clinical anxiety.
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    Reward Motivation as a Moderator of Maladaptive Fear/Avoidance Relations during Decision-Making
    (2024-06) Emich, Abigail
    Overgeneralization of conditioned fear is a key facet of clinical anxiety, which occurs when fear spreads to safe stimuli resembling learned danger cues. When individuals are confronted with competing motivations (e.g., avoid perceived threats or approach rewards), overgeneralization can drive maladaptive avoidance of safe stimuli at the expense of rewards and valued life goals. Only a few studies have examined moderators of the relationship between overgeneralized fear and maladaptive avoidance (i.e., aversive Pavlovian-instrumental covariation during generalization, or APIC-G), and no studies have examined individual differences in reward motivation as a potential moderator. The current study fills this gap in the literature. 123 participants with and without various anxiety-related disorders completed a validated fear generalization task in which they could avoid the risk of shock at the cost of poorer task performance. The task measured both fear generalization and self-reported desire to win while functional magnetic resonance imaging was obtained. Fear generalization was measured using multiple methods, including changes in activation in neural regions of interest. Hierarchical linear regressions revealed that win motivation significantly moderated the relationship between various indices of fear generalization and subsequent maladaptive behavioral avoidance. This interaction was statistically significant when fear generalization indexed by left anterior insula activation (standardized β = -.22, p = .018), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation (standardized β = -.18, p = .030), shock expectancy ratings (standardized β = -.19, p = .011), and retrospective anxiety ratings (standardized β = -.16, p = .007). In this way, greater win motivation was associated with weaker associations between fear generalization and maladaptive avoidance. Key implications for this work include the possibility that individuals higher in reward motivation are less likely to maladaptively avoid due to overgeneralized fear, which could make them less vulnerable to the development of clinical anxiety or more likely to respond to treatment.