ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2020
Neural correlates of conceptual-level fear generalization in posttraumatic stress disorder.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Network Centrality and Modularity of Structural Covariance Networks in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Multisite ENIGMA-PGC Study.Brain connectivity · 2023Pooled it
- A meta-analysis of conditioned fear generalization in anxiety-related disorders.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Pooled it
- Fear conditioning and extinction in obsessive-compulsive disorder: A systematic review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Pooled it
- Acute stress leaves fear generalization in healthy individuals intact.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Trial
- Are you afraid? Neurophysiological responses to multidimensional fear in an interactive semi-immersive environment.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2026Article
- Functional loss of PKMζ in the dorsal hippocampus potentiates the time-dependent increase in false contextual fear memory and impairs spatial recognition memory in mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Silent regulators of trauma: the microRNA blueprint underlying post-traumatic stress disorder biology.Environmental epigenetics · 2026Review
- Examining attentional avoidance in post-traumatic stress disorder: an exploratory 'Face in the Crowd' paradigm using eye-tracking.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Article
- A visual generalization gradient of conceptual stimuli based on fear acquisition in visual and auditory modalities.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Impaired mnemonic pattern separation associated with PTSD symptoms paradoxically improves with regular cannabis use.Npj mental health research · 2025Article
- Neural Response to Food Cues in Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Traumatic stress alters neural reactivity to visual stimulation.NPP - digital psychiatry and neuroscience · 2025Article
- Far from the threatening crowd: Generalisation of conditioned threat expectancy and fear in COVID-19 lockdown.Learning & behavior · 2024Article
- Integrating and fragmenting memories under stress and alcohol.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- Contingency Reversal in Conditioned Fear Learning: The Moderated Mediation Model of Intolerance of Uncertainty and Instruction.Psychology research and behavior management · 2024Article
- Pre-Learning Stress That Is Temporally Removed from Acquisition Impairs Fear Learning.Biology · 2023Article
- Aerobic exercise after extinction learning reduces return of fear and enhances memory of items encoded during extinction learning.Mental health and physical activity · 2023Article
- Article
- Editorial: Back to the future: on the road towards precision psychiatry, volume II.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Elucidating behavioral and functional connectivity markers of aberrant threat discrimination in PTSD.Depression and anxiety · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) may develop when mechanisms for making accurate distinctions about threat relevance have gone awry. Generalization across conceptually related objects has been hypothesized based on clinical observation in PTSD, but the neural mechanisms remain unexplored. Recent trauma-exposed military veterans (n = 46) were grouped into PTSD (n = 23) and non-PTSD (n = 23). Participants learned to generalize fear across conceptual categories (animals or tools) of semantically related items that were partially reinforced by shock during functional magnetic resonance imaging. Conditioned fear learning was quantified by shock expectancy and skin conductance response (SCR). Relative to veteran controls, PTSD subjects exhibited a stronger neural response associated with fear generalization to the reinforced object category in the striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, occipitotemporal cortex, and insula (Z > 2.3; p < 0.05; whole-brain corrected). Based on SCR, both groups generalized the shock contingency to the reinforced conceptual category, but learning was not significantly different between groups. We found that PTSD was associated with an enhanced neural response in fronto-limbic, midline, and occipitotemporal regions to a learned representation of threat that is based on previously established conceptual knowledge of the relationship between basic-level exemplars within a semantic category. Behaviorally, veterans with PTSD were somewhat slower to differentiate threat and safety categories as compared with trauma-exposed veteran controls owing in part to an initial overgeneralized behavioral response to the safe category. These results have implications for understanding how fear spreads across semantically related concepts in PTSD.
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