Trial reportThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2017
Active Avoidance: Neural Mechanisms and Attenuation of Pavlovian Conditioned Responding.
Trial report in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 65 papers.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
65 citing papers in PubMed, 138 citations in OpenAlex.
- Distinct trajectories of perceived control over aversive stimulation predict affective reactions to stressors over and above objective control.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Behavioral avoidance predicts treatment outcome with exposure and response prevention for obsessive-compulsive disorder.Depression and anxiety · 2018Trial
- Article
- Latent subdimensions of anxiety and depression differentially influence exertion of effort in pursuit of reward versus avoidance of threat.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- The Tap-to-Safety Task: A Novel fMRI Paradigm Assessing Repetitive Threat-Neutralization.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and amygdala underlies avoidance learning during adolescence: Implications for developmental psychopathology.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Transition ability to safe states reduces fear responses to height.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Developmentally distinct architectures in top-down pathways controlling threat avoidance.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Intersect between brain mechanisms of conditioned threat, active avoidance, and reward.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- Article
- Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Active Avoidance and Their Relevance to Anxiety Disorders.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Persistent defensive reactivity during extensive avoidance training as a potential mechanism for the perpetuation of safety behaviors.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Neural correlates of proactive avoidance deficits and alcohol use motives in problem drinking.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Independence Threat or Interdependence Threat? The Focusing Effect on Social or Physical Threat Modulates Brain Activity.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- Adolescents flexibly adapt action selection based on controllability inferences.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Deficits in proactive avoidance and neural responses to drinking motives in problem drinkers.Research square · 2024Article
- Threat and Reward Imminence Processing in the Human Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- From helplessness to controllability: toward a neuroscience of resilience.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
5 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
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Patients with anxiety disorders often experience a relapse in symptoms after exposure therapy. Similarly, threat responses acquired during Pavlovian threat conditioning often return after extinction learning. Accordingly, there is a need for alternative methods to persistently reduce threat responding. Studies in rodents have suggested that exercising behavioral control over an aversive stimulus can persistently diminish threat responses, and that these effects are mediated by the amygdala, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and striatum. In this fMRI study, we attempted to translate these findings to humans. Subjects first underwent threat conditioning. We then contrasted two forms of safety learning: active avoidance, in which participants could prevent the shock through an action, and yoked extinction, with shock presentation matched to the active condition, but without instrumental control. The following day, we assessed subjects' threat responses (measured by skin conductance) to the conditioned stimuli without shock. Subjects next underwent threat conditioning with novel stimuli. Yoked extinction subjects showed an increase in conditioned response to stimuli from the previous day, but the active avoidance group did not. Additionally, active avoidance subjects showed reduced conditioned responding during novel threat conditioning, but the extinction group did not. We observed between-group differences in striatal BOLD responses to shock omission in Avoidance/Extinction. These findings suggest a differential role for the striatum in human active avoidance versus extinction learning, and indicate that active avoidance may be more effective than extinction in persistently diminishing threat responses.
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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.