ArticleNeuron2018
Attenuating Neural Threat Expression with Imagination.
Article in Neuron, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Navigating the garden of forking paths for data exclusions in fear conditioning research.eLife · 2019Pooled it
- A novel imagery-based retrieval-extinction training for intervention in nicotine addiction.BMC medicine · 2025Trial
- Neuroimaging correlates and predictors of response to repeated-dose intravenous ketamine in PTSD: preliminary evidence.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2021Trial
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity during extinction recall suggests successful extinction learning via mental imagery.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural signatures of emotional intent and inference align during social consensus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- An intracranial dissection of human escape circuits.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Organization of Anxiety Symptoms Along the Threat Imminence Continuum.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Modulating subjective pain perception with decoded Montreal Neurological Institute-space neurofeedback: a proof-of-concept study.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- An Honest Reckoning With the Amygdala and Mental Illness.The American journal of psychiatry · 2024Review
- The multisensory nature of human action imagery.Psychological research · 2024Review
- Semantic structures facilitate threat memory integration throughout the medial temporal lobe and medial prefrontal cortex.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- A neurofunctional signature of subjective disgust generalizes to oral distaste and socio-moral contexts.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- A systems identification approach using Bayes factors to deconstruct the brain bases of emotion regulation.Nature neuroscience · 2024Article
- Distributed neural representations of conditioned threat in the human brain.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A neural signature for the subjective experience of threat anticipation under uncertainty.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Neurocognitive Model of Schema-Congruent and -Incongruent Learning in Clinical Disorders: Application to Social Anxiety and Beyond.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2023Article
- Understanding anxiety symptoms as aberrant defensive responding along the threat imminence continuum.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- The nature and neurobiology of fear and anxiety: State of the science and opportunities for accelerating discovery.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Value-based neural representations predict social decision preferences.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Functional neuroimaging of resilience to trauma: convergent evidence and challenges for future research.Psychological medicine · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Imagination is an internal simulation of real-life events and a common treatment tool for anxiety disorders; however, the neural processes by which imagination exerts behavioral control are unclear. This investigation tests whether and how imagined exposures to a threatening stimulus, conditioned in the real world, influence neural and physiological manifestations of threat. We found that imagined and real extinction are equally effective in the reduction of threat-related neural patterns and physiological responses elicited upon re-exposure to real-world threatening cues. Network connectivity during the extinction phase showed that imagined, like real, extinction engaged the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as a central hub. vmPFC, primary auditory cortex, and amygdala activation during imagined and real extinction were predictive of individual differences in extinction success. The nucleus accumbens, however, predicted extinction success in the imagined extinction group alone. We conclude that deliberate imagination can attenuate reactions to threat through perceptual and associative learning mechanisms.
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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.