ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2016
Neural signals of vicarious extinction learning.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Social support facilitates threat extinction retention in humans: an fMRI study.Translational psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity during extinction recall suggests successful extinction learning via mental imagery.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Bridging clinical and educational contexts: mentalization-based techniques in educational settings.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Neural and physiological correlates of parent-child observational threat extinction.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Attachment, Mentalizing and Trauma: Then (1992) and Now (2022).Brain sciences · 2023Review
- Watch and Learn: Vicarious Threat Learning across Human Development.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Observation of others' threat reactions recovers memories previously shaped by firsthand experiences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Neural Computations of Threat.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
- The neural and computational systems of social learning.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Review
- The mere physical presence of another person reduces human autonomic responses to aversive sounds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- The Neurocircuitry Underlying Additive Effects of Safety Instruction on Extinction Learning.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- What's in a word? How instructions, suggestions, and social information change pain and emotion.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2017Review
- Social Fear Learning: from Animal Models to Human Function.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2017Review
- Assessment of social transmission of threats in humans using observational fear conditioning.Nature protocols · 2017Article
- Viewpoints: Dialogues on the functional role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.Nature neuroscience · 2016Review
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
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Abstract
Social transmission of both threat and safety is ubiquitous, but little is known about the neural circuitry underlying vicarious safety learning. This is surprising given that these processes are critical to flexibly adapt to a changeable environment. To address how the expression of previously learned fears can be modified by the transmission of social information, two conditioned stimuli (CS + s) were paired with shock and the third was not. During extinction, we held constant the amount of direct, non-reinforced, exposure to the CSs (i.e. direct extinction), and critically varied whether another individual-acting as a demonstrator-experienced safety (CS + vic safety) or aversive reinforcement (CS + vic reinf). During extinction, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) responses to the CS + vic reinf increased but decreased to the CS + vic safety This pattern of vmPFC activity was reversed during a subsequent fear reinstatement test, suggesting a temporal shift in the involvement of the vmPFC. Moreover, only the CS + vic reinf association recovered. Our data suggest that vicarious extinction prevents the return of conditioned fear responses, and that this efficacy is reflected by diminished vmPFC involvement during extinction learning. The present findings may have important implications for understanding how social information influences the persistence of fear memories in individuals suffering from emotional disorders.
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