Overgeneralization of Conditioned Fear in the Anxiety Disorders

Abstract

According to many conditioning accounts of clinical anxiety, the central pathogen can be found in aberrant acquisition or extinction of learned fear to neutral stimuli (i.e., conditioned stimuli [CS]) paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). While overresponding to the CS is an important candidate source of anxiety pathology, both clinical observation and mounting experimental data implicate generalization of fear to stimuli resembling the CS as an equally promising candidate (e.g., Grillon & Morgan, 1999; Lissek et al., 2005; Lissek et al., 2010; Mineka & Zinbarg, 1996). Important to the current issue on ‘‘Trauma and Memory,’’ generalization of fear to stimuli resembling those present during a traumatic event is a core feature of the posttraumatic stress response (American Psychiatric Association, 2000) and is likely influenced by conditioning-dependent modifications to the neural representation of the CS stored in memory. The current paper (1) summarizes the connection between conditioned-fear generalization and pathologic anxiety including a recent empirical example demonstrating the link and (2) explores memorial substrates of conditioned generalization and the ways they are related to overgeneralization of the kind seen in anxiety pathology.