ArticleJournal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN2015
Sex differences in conditioned stimulus discrimination during context-dependent fear learning and its retrieval in humans: the role of biological sex, contraceptives and menstrual cycle phases.
Article in Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 77 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of separate and combined estradiol and progesterone administration on fear extinction in healthy pre-menopausal women.Translational psychiatry · 2024Trial
- The progesterone to estradiol ratio predicts fear extinction in mice and humans.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Lasting effects of oral contraceptives on fear responses to a safe context.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Mixed Management in Growing and Finishing Pigs: Impacts on Social Behavior and Judgment Bias.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Sex Differences in the Neurobiology of Fear and Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Appetitive conditioning with pornographic stimuli elicits stronger activation in reward regions than monetary and gaming-related stimuli.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Fear-Conditioning to Unpredictable Threats Reveals Sex and Strain Differences in Rat Fear-Potentiated Startle (FPS).Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Fear-conditioning to unpredictable threats reveals sex differences in rat fear-potentiated startle (FPS).bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Sex differences in fear responses: Neural circuits.Neuropharmacology · 2023Review
- Fear conditioning and stimulus generalization in association with age in children and adolescents.European child & adolescent psychiatry · 2022Article
- Revisiting sex differences in the acquisition and extinction of threat conditioning in humans.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- The skin conductance response indicating pain relief is independent of self or social influence on pain.Psychophysiology · 2022Article
- Young female participants show blunted placebo effects associated with blunted responses to a cue predicting a safe stimulus in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Using Translational Models of Fear Conditioning to Uncover Sex-Linked Factors Related to PTSD Risk.Journal of psychiatry and brain science · 2022Article
- Impact of exogenous estradiol on task-based and resting-state neural signature during and after fear extinction in healthy women.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2021Article
- On the basis of sex: Differences in safety discrimination vs. conditioned inhibition.Behavioural brain research · 2021Review
- The Impact of the Menstrual Cycle and Underlying Hormones in Anxiety and PTSD: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go From Here?Current psychiatry reports · 2021Review
- Neural correlates of safety learning.Behavioural brain research · 2021Article
- Estradiol Modulates Neural and Behavioral Arousal in Women With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder During a Fear Learning and Extinction Task.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2020Article
- Filtering and model-based analysis independently improve skin-conductance response measures in the fMRI environment: Validation in a sample of women with PTSD.International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundAnxiety disorders are more prevalent in women than in men. Despite this sexual dimorphism, most experimental studies are conducted in male participants and studies focusing on sex differences are sparse. In addition, the role of hormonal contraceptives and menstrual cycle phase in fear conditioning and extinction processes remain largely unknown.
methodsWe investigated sex differences in context-dependent fear acquisition and extinction (day 1) and their retrieval/expression (day 2). Skin conductance responses (SCRs), fear and unconditioned stimulus expectancy ratings were obtained.
resultsWe included 377 individuals (261 women) in our study. Robust sex differences were observed in all dependent measures. Women generally displayed higher subjective ratings but smaller SCRs than men and showed reduced excitatory/inhibitory conditioned stimulus (CS+/CS-) discrimination in all dependent measures. Furthermore, women using hormonal contraceptives showed reduced SCR CS discrimination on day 2 than men and free-cycling women, while menstrual cycle phase had no effect. LIMITATIONS: Possible limitations include the simultaneous testing of up to 4 participants in cubicles, which might have introduced a social component, and not assessing postexperimental contingency awareness.
conclusionThe response pattern in women shows striking similarity to previously reported sex differences in patients with anxiety. Our results suggest that pronounced deficits in associative discrimination learning and subjective expression of safety information (CS- responses) might underlie higher prevalence and higher symptom rates seen in women with anxiety disorders. The data call for consideration of biological sex and hormonal contraceptive use in future studies and may suggest that targeting inhibitory learning during therapy might aid precision medicine.
Indexed as
Identifiers
26107163PMC4622633W2111073674What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.