ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Stress promotes generalization of older but not recent threat memories.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Acute stress leaves fear generalization in healthy individuals intact.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Trial
- CRH neurons in the dorsal bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (dBNST) mediate contextual fear generalization.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- Dissociable memory modulation mechanisms facilitate fear amnesia at different timescales.eLife · 2025Article
- Affective Visual Circuit Dysfunction in Trauma and Stress-Related Disorders.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Stress disrupts engram ensembles in lateral amygdala to generalize threat memory in mice.Cell · 2025Article
- Emotion Regulation Under Stress: A Social Processing and Memory Perspective.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Traumatic stress alters neural reactivity to visual stimulation.NPP - digital psychiatry and neuroscience · 2025Article
- High and low current perceived stress associated with enhanced emotional mnemonic discrimination.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Dissociable contributions of the amygdala and ventral hippocampus to stress-induced changes in defensive behavior.Cell reports · 2024Article
- Opposing effects of pre-encoding stress on neural substrates of item and emotional contextual source memory retrieval.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- Integrating and fragmenting memories under stress and alcohol.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- Multiple timescales of temporal context in risky choice: Behavioral identification and relationships to physiological arousal.PloS one · 2024Article
- Pre-Learning Stress That Is Temporally Removed from Acquisition Impairs Fear Learning.Biology · 2023Article
- Structural covariance of the ventral visual stream predicts posttraumatic intrusion and nightmare symptoms: a multivariate data fusion analysis.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- Functional Reuniens and Rhomboid Nuclei Are Required for Proper Acquisition and Expression of Cued and Contextual Fear in Trace Fear Conditioning.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Stress-induced generalization of negative memories is mediated by an extended hippocampal circuit.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Cognitive Prerequisites in Development of Childhood Anxiety: An Integrative Literature Review and Thematic Analysis.Iranian journal of child neurology · 2022Review
- Neurobiology: Novel peptide pathways impact threat discrimination.Current biology : CB · 2021Article
- Active suppression prevents the return of threat memory in humans.Communications biology · 2021Article
- The interaction between stress and chronic pain through the lens of threat learning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Stress broadly affects the ability to regulate emotions and may contribute to generalization of threat-related behaviors to harmless stimuli. Behavioral generalization also tends to increase over time as memory precision for recent events gives way to more gist-like representations. Thus, acute stress coupled with a delay in time from a negative experience may be a strong predictor of the transition from normal to generalized fear expression. Here, we investigated the effect of a single-episode acute stressor on generalization of aversive learning when stress is administered either immediately after an aversive learning event or following a delay. In a between-subjects design, healthy adult volunteers underwent threat (fear) conditioning using a tone-conditioned stimulus paired with an electric shock to the wrist and another tone not paired with shock. Behavioral generalization was tested to a range of novel tones either on the same day (experiment 1) or 24 h later (experiment 2) and was preceded by either an acute stress induction or a control task. Anticipatory sympathetic arousal [i.e., skin conductance responses (SCRs)] and explicit measures of shock expectancy served as dependent measures. Stress administered shortly after threat conditioning did not affect behavioral generalization. In contrast, stress administered following a delay led to heightened arousal and increased generalization of SCRs and explicit measures of shock expectancy. These findings show that acute stress increases generalization of older but not recent threat memories and have clinical relevance to understanding overgeneralization characteristics of anxiety and stress-related disorders.
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