@article{ref1,
title="The temporal course of over-generalized conditioned threat expectancies in posttraumatic stress disorder",
journal="Behaviour research and therapy",
year="2019",
author="Hammell, Abbey E. and Helwig, Nathaniel E. and Kaczkurkin, Antonia N. and Sponheim, Scott R. and Lissek, Shmuel",
volume="124",
number="",
pages="e103513-e103513",
abstract="One key conditioning abnormality in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is heightened generalization of fear from a conditioned danger-cue (CS+) to similarly appearing safe stimuli. The present work represents the first effort to track the time-course of heightened generalization in PTSD with the prediction of heightened PTSD-related over-generalization in earlier but not later trials. This prediction derives from past discriminative fear-conditioning studies providing incidental evidence that over-generalization in PTSD may be reduced with sufficient learning trials. In the current study, we re-analyzed previously published conditioned fear-generalization data (Kaczkurkin et al., 2017) including combat veterans with PTSD (n = 15) or subthreshold PTSD (SubPTSD: n = 18), and trauma controls (TC: n = 19). This re-analysis aimed to identify the trial-by-trial course of group differences in generalized perceived risk across three classes of safe generalization stimuli (GSs) parametrically varying in similarity to a CS+ paired with shock. Those with PTSD and SubPTSD, relative to TC, displayed significantly elevated generalization to all GSs combined in early but not late generalization trials. Additionally, over-generalization in PTSD and SubPTSD persisted across trials to a greater extent for classes of GSs bearing higher resemblance to CS+. Such results suggest that PTSD-related over-generalization of conditioned threat expectancies can be reduced with sufficient exposure to unreinforced GSs and accentuate the importance of analyzing trial-by-trial changes when assessing over-generalization in clinical populations.<br><br>Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0005-7967",
doi="10.1016/j.brat.2019.103513",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2019.103513"
}