Citation

Simon-Kutscher K, Wanke N, Hiller C, Schwabe L. Psychol. Sci. 2019; 30(8): 1123-1135.

Affiliation

Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, University of Hamburg.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797619852027

PMID

31242088

Abstract

During a threatening encounter, people can learn to associate the aversive event with a discrete preceding cue or with the context in which the event took place, corresponding to cue-dependent and context-dependent fear conditioning, respectively. Which of these forms of fear learning prevails has critical implications for fear-related psychopathology. We tested here whether acute stress may modulate the balance of cue-dependent and contextual fear learning. Participants (N = 72) underwent a stress or control manipulation 30 min before they completed a fear-learning task in a virtual environment that allowed both cued and contextual fear learning.

RESULTS showed equally strong cue- and context-dependent fear conditioning in the control group. Stress, however, abolished contextual fear learning, which was directly correlated with the activity of the stress hormone cortisol, and made cue-dependent fear more resistant to extinction. These results are the first to show that stress favors cue-dependent over contextual fear learning.

Language: en

Keywords

amygdala; context; cortisol; cue; fear conditioning; hippocampus; open data; preregistered; stress