ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Proximal threats promote enhanced acquisition and persistence of reactive fear-learning circuits.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
31 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 58 citations in OpenAlex.
- Should perception of emotions be classified according to threat detection rather than emotional valence? An updated meta-analysis for a whole-brain atlas of emotional faces processing.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNPooled it
- Oxytocin Reduces Subjective Fear in Naturalistic Social Contexts via Enhancing Top-Down Middle Cingulate Amygdala Regulation and Brain-Wide Fear Representations.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Trial
- Using computer games to explore foraging-predation trade-offs and spatial learning in humans.Royal Society open science · 2026Article
- Dissociable Neural Responses to Conditioned Social Threats are Modulated by Spatial Proximity in PTSD and MDD.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Article
- An intracranial dissection of human escape circuits.Nature communications · 2025Article
- How Fear Memory is Updated: From Reconsolidation to Extinction?Neuroscience bulletin · 2025Review
- Bodily illusion enhances subjective fear of safety-margin violations surrounding the bodily self.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Cerebellar Contributions to Traumatic Autobiographical Memory in People with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2024Article
- Social threat avoidance depends on action-outcome predictability.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Threat impairs flexible use of a cognitive map.Motivation and emotion · 2023Article
- Conscious expectancy rather than associative strength elicits brain activity during single-cue fear conditioning.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Neighborhood Disadvantage and Neural Correlates of Threat and Reward Processing in Survivors of Recent Trauma.JAMA network open · 2023Article
- Neural representations of anxiety in adolescents with anorexia nervosa: a multivariate approach.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
- The nature and neurobiology of fear and anxiety: State of the science and opportunities for accelerating discovery.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Comparison of behavioral and brain indices of fear renewal during a standard vs. novel immersive reality Pavlovian fear extinction paradigm in healthy adults.Behavioural brain research · 2023Article
- The cerebellum and fear extinction: evidence from rodent and human studies.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2023Review
- Neuroimaging of Fear Extinction.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Review
- Cerebellar contributions to fear-based emotional processing: relevance to understanding the neural circuits involved in autism.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2023Review
- The cerebellum during provocation and aggressive behaviour: A 7 T fMRI study.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Physical proximity to a traumatic event increases the severity of accompanying stress symptoms, an effect that is reminiscent of evolutionarily configured fear responses based on threat imminence. Despite being widely adopted as a model system for stress and anxiety disorders, fear-conditioning research has not yet characterized how threat proximity impacts the mechanisms of fear acquisition and extinction in the human brain. We used three-dimensional (3D) virtual reality technology to manipulate the egocentric distance of conspecific threats while healthy adult participants navigated virtual worlds during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Consistent with theoretical predictions, proximal threats enhanced fear acquisition by shifting conditioned learning from cognitive to reactive fear circuits in the brain and reducing amygdala-cortical connectivity during both fear acquisition and extinction. With an analysis of representational pattern similarity between the acquisition and extinction phases, we further demonstrate that proximal threats impaired extinction efficacy via persistent multivariate representations of conditioned learning in the cerebellum, which predicted susceptibility to later fear reinstatement. These results show that conditioned threats encountered in close proximity are more resistant to extinction learning and suggest that the canonical neural circuitry typically associated with fear learning requires additional consideration of a more reactive neural fear system to fully account for this effect.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.