ArticleNature protocols2017
Assessment of social transmission of threats in humans using observational fear conditioning.
Article in Nature protocols, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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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
33 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 80 citations in OpenAlex.
- Learning by observing: a systematic exploration of modulatory factors and the impact of observationally induced placebo and nocebo effects on treatment outcomes.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Pooled it
- Navigating the garden of forking paths for data exclusions in fear conditioning research.eLife · 2019Pooled it
- Endogenous opioids regulate social threat learning in humans.Nature communications · 2017Trial
- Resolving temporal threat uncertainty by observational learning involves the amygdala, hippocampus and anterior insula.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- How observing others influences the subsequent acquisition of fear of bodily sensations.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2026Article
- Increased c-Fos expression in lateral habenula during social transmission of negative valence in prairie voles.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Social learning of emotion and its implication for memory: an ERP study.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Observational learning of threat-related attentional bias.Cognition & emotion · 2024Article
- Observational threat learning influences costly avoidance behaviour in healthy humans.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Rats respond to aversive emotional arousal of human handlers with the activation of the basolateral and central amygdala.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Sex differences in social buffering and social contagion of alarm responses in zebrafish.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Learning via instructions about observations: exploring similarities and differences with learning via actual observations.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Social threat and safety learning in individuals with adverse childhood experiences: electrocortical evidence on face processing, recognition, and working memory.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2022Article
- Measuring daily-life fear perception change: A computational study in the context of COVID-19.PloS one · 2022Article
- Article
- Schizotypal personality traits and the social learning of fear.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Watch and Learn: Vicarious Threat Learning across Human Development.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- The cultural evolution of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The face value of feedback: facial behaviour is shaped by goals and punishments during interaction with dynamic faces.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- An exploration of amygdala-prefrontal mechanisms in the intergenerational transmission of learned fear.Developmental science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Across the human life span, fear is often acquired indirectly by observation of the emotional expressions of others. The observational fear conditioning protocol was previously developed as a laboratory model for investigating socially acquired threat responses. This protocol serves as a suitable alternative to the widely used Pavlovian fear conditioning, in which threat responses are acquired through direct experiences. In the observational fear conditioning protocol, the participant (observer) watches a demonstrator being presented with a conditioned stimulus (CS) paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). The expression of threat learning is measured as the conditioned response (CR) expressed by the observer in the absence of the demonstrator. CRs are commonly measured as skin conductance responses, but behavioral and neural measures have also been implemented. The experimental procedure is suitable for divergent populations, can be administered by a graduate student and takes ∼40 min. Similar protocols are used in animals, emphasizing its value as a translational tool for studying socioemotional learning.
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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.