SynthesisMolecular psychiatry2016
Neural signatures of human fear conditioning: an updated and extended meta-analysis of fMRI studies.
Synthesis in Molecular psychiatry, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 350 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
350 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 707 citations in OpenAlex.
- Beyond fear circuits: multiscale neurobiological architecture of panic disorder.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Pooled it
- A working model linking the psychopathology and pathophysiology of major depressive disorder - an umbrella review of neuroimaging studies and a conceptual framework.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Common neural correlates of vestibular stimulation and fear learning: an fMRI meta-analysis.Journal of neurology · 2023Pooled it
- Community-level explicit racial prejudice potentiates whites' neural responses to black faces: A spatial meta-analysis.Social neuroscience · 2022Pooled it
- Common and specific large-scale brain changes in major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders, and chronic pain: a transdiagnostic multimodal meta-analysis of structural and functional MRI studies.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Pooled it
- Cerebellar Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation in the Theta Band Prevents Recall of the Initial Fear Association After Extinction Training.Human brain mapping · 2026Trial
- Effect of app-based mindfulness on extinction recall - a 7T-fMRI study.Scientific reports · 2026Trial
- Hormonal mechanisms of women's risk in the face of traumatic stress.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Trial
- A large-scale multimodal investigation of the interplay between the serotonergic system and emotion processing.Translational psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Effects of intranasal oxytocin on fear extinction learning.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Trial
- Attenuating human fear memory retention with minocycline: a randomized placebo-controlled trial.Translational psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Predictors of clinical worsening during a discontinuation trial of serotonin reuptake inhibitors for obsessive compulsive disorder.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2024Trial
- Trial
- Dopamine D2/3 receptors and functional connectivity during fear extinction: A PET-fMRI study.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Anxiety sensitivity and intolerance of uncertainty track distinct neurobehavioral dimensions of avoidance in anxiety-related disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Opposing sensitive period effects of early and late childhood maltreatment on corticolimbic responses in fear conditioning.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Enhanced autonomic fear conditioning at age 3 in successful adult criminal offenders.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Cannabidiol and neural correlates of threat anticipation in alcohol use disorder.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Article
- Psychological stress induced mitochondrial response in humans and its medial prefrontal biomarker correlates.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
290 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Classical Pavlovian fear conditioning remains the most widely employed experimental model of fear and anxiety, and continues to inform contemporary pathophysiological accounts of clinical anxiety disorders. Despite its widespread application in human and animal studies, the neurobiological basis of fear conditioning remains only partially understood. Here we provide a comprehensive meta-analysis of human fear-conditioning studies carried out with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), yielding a pooled sample of 677 participants from 27 independent studies. As a distinguishing feature of this meta-analysis, original statistical brain maps were obtained from the authors of 13 of these studies. Our primary analyses demonstrate that human fear conditioning is associated with a consistent and robust pattern of neural activation across a hypothesized genuine network of brain regions resembling existing anatomical descriptions of the 'central autonomic-interoceptive network'. This finding is discussed with a particular emphasis on the neural substrates of conscious fear processing. Our associated meta-analysis of functional deactivations-a scarcely addressed dynamic in fMRI fear-conditioning studies-also suggests the existence of a coordinated brain response potentially underlying the 'safety signal' (that is, non-threat) processing. We attempt to provide an integrated summary on these findings with the view that they may inform ongoing studies of fear-conditioning processes both in healthy and clinical populations, as investigated with neuroimaging and other experimental approaches.
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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.