How does fear conditioning work?

Fear Conditioning (FC) is a type of associative learning task in which mice learn to associate a particular neutral Conditional Stimulus (CS; often a tone) with an aversive Unconditional Stimulus (US; often a mild electrical foot shock) and show a Conditional Response (CR; often as freezing).

What is an example of fear conditioning?

The most famous example of human fear conditioning is the case of Little Albert, an 11 month old infant used in John Watson and Rosalie Rayner’s 1920 study. They are taught to fear a tone or a light via repeated pairings with a moderate foot shook.

How does fear affect memory?

Fear and stress have a dramatic ability to affect learning, memory, and extinction processes in the brain. Memory of fearful events is often more robust than for neutral events and this is in part mediated by the release of stress-related hormones.

What brain region is involved in the extinction of fear?

Amygdala
Amygdala. The basolateral complex of the amygdala (BLA; lateral, basal and accessory basal nuclei) is critical to the acquisition and expression of conditioned fear and seems to be involved in fear extinction as well.

What is a learned fear response?

Taken together, animal models suggest that a learned fear response (i.e., elevated cognitive and autonomic arousal) to a conditioned stimulus (e.g., objects, thoughts, feelings, physiological sensations) results in significant sleep disturbance, even when the original feared situation is no longer present.

How is fear learned through classical conditioning?

Fear is a behavior that can be learned via classical conditioning. When a neutral stimulus, something that does not cause fear, is associated with an unconditioned stimulus, something that causes fear; the process then leads to the response of fear towards the previously neutral stimulus.

Is fear a conditioned or unconditioned response?

How is fear learned psychology?

Fear can be learned through direct experience with a threat, but it can also be learned via social means such as verbal warnings or observ-ing others. Phelps’s research has shown that the expression of socially learned fears shares neural mechanisms with fears that have been acquired through direct experience.

How does fear impact learning?

When we are in a state of fear, there are stress hormones in our bloodstream. Researchers have shown that low and medium levels of the stress hormone, called cortisol, improve learning and enhance memory, whereas high levels of the stress hormone have a bad effect on learning and memory.

How does fear affect child development?

Indeed, children who have had chronic and intense fearful experiences often lose the capacity to differentiate between threat and safety. This impairs their ability to learn and interact with others, because they frequently perceive threat in familiar social circumstances, such as in their home or neighbourhood.

How does fear extinction occur?

Fear extinction is defined as a decline in conditioned fear responses (CRs) following nonreinforced exposure to a feared conditioned stimulus (CS). However, there also is evidence to suggest that extinction is an “unlearning” process corresponding to depotentiation of potentiated synapses within the amygdala.

Which of the following brain regions appears largely responsible for the extinction of learned fearful behaviors in humans?

prefrontal cortex
A triad of brain regions, including the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala, form an essential brain circuit involved in fear conditioning and extinction. Within this circuit, the prefrontal cortex is thought to exert top-down control over subcortical structures to regulate appropriate behavioral responses.