ReviewMolecular psychiatry2017
The birth, death and resurrection of avoidance: a reconceptualization of a troubled paradigm.
Review in Molecular psychiatry, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 151 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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.
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Who cites it
151 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Fear conditioning and extinction in obsessive-compulsive disorder: A systematic review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Generalization of beneficial exposure effects to untreated stimuli from another fear category.Translational psychiatry · 2023Trial
- Behavioral avoidance predicts treatment outcome with exposure and response prevention for obsessive-compulsive disorder.Depression and anxiety · 2018Trial
- An elevated plus-maze in mixed reality for studying human anxiety-related behavior.BMC biology · 2017Trial
- Active Avoidance: Neural Mechanisms and Attenuation of Pavlovian Conditioned Responding.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2017Trial
- The next generation of fear generalization.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Article
- Dopamine D2 receptors bypass canonical signaling to directly tune NMDA receptor function and aversive learning.Science advances · 2026Article
- Mild concussion impairs extinction of avoidance and alters respective brain circuits in male rats.Experimental neurology · 2026Article
- Latent subdimensions of anxiety and depression differentially influence exertion of effort in pursuit of reward versus avoidance of threat.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- A synaptic mechanism for encoding the learned value of action-derived safety.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Male Sapap3 knockout mice show threat bias under conflict during platform-mediated avoidance task: effects of extinction with response prevention and implications for obsessive compulsive disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Toward a Modern View of Pavlovian Conditioning in Applied Behavior Analysis.Perspectives on behavior science · 2026Article
- Safety Signals Enable Single-Episode Active Avoidance paradigm and Expose Threat Generalization in Tuberous Sclerosis Complex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Devaluation of response-produced safety signals reveals circuits for goal-directed versus habitual avoidance in dorsal striatum.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Distress Intolerance Is Associated With a Greater Reward Positivity to Aversive Avoidance Feedback.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Human approach-avoidance conflict behaviour relates to transdiagnostic psychiatric symptom dimensions.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Approach-Avoidance Conflict Paradigms in Animal and Human Studies of Anxiety-A Narrative Review.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Nitrergic Signaling Mediation of Neurobehavioral Responses to Stress in Zebrafish.Journal of neurochemistry · 2025Review
- Ictal emotional features in pediatric and young adult patients with frontal lobe epilepsy.Epilepsia open · 2025Article
91 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Research on avoidance conditioning began in the late 1930s as a way to use laboratory experiments to better understand uncontrollable fear and anxiety. Avoidance was initially conceived of as a two-factor learning process in which fear is first acquired through Pavlovian aversive conditioning (so-called fear conditioning), and then behaviors that reduce the fear aroused by the Pavlovian conditioned stimulus are reinforced through instrumental conditioning. Over the years, criticisms of both the avoidance paradigm and the two-factor fear theory arose. By the mid-1980s, avoidance had fallen out of favor as an experimental model relevant to fear and anxiety. However, recent progress in understanding the neural basis of Pavlovian conditioning has stimulated a new wave of research on avoidance. This new work has fostered new insights into contributions of not only Pavlovian and instrumental learning but also habit learning, to avoidance, and has suggested that the reinforcing event underlying the instrumental phase should be conceived in terms of cellular and molecular events in specific circuits rather than in terms of vague notions of fear reduction. In our approach, defensive reactions (freezing), actions (avoidance) and habits (habitual avoidance) are viewed as being controlled by unique circuits that operate nonconsciously in the control of behavior, and that are distinct from the circuits that give rise to conscious feelings of fear and anxiety. These refinements, we suggest, overcome older criticisms, justifying the value of the new wave of research on avoidance, and offering a fresh perspective on the clinical implications of this work.
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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.