ArticleScientific reports2020
Vicarious conditioned fear acquisition and extinction in child-parent dyads.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The Association Between Parent-to-Child Fear Learning Pathways and Anxiety Sensitivity: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2025Pooled it
- Neural and physiological correlates of parent-child observational threat extinction.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessment of Dysphagia Management Competence among Healthcare Providers: A Scoping Review.Dysphagia · 2025Article
- The role of the first interpersonal trauma exposure's developmental period on fear regulation processes among adult women.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Article
- Stress in lockdown: exploring the interplay and effects of cortisol and psychological distress in parent-child dyads.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2025Article
- Effect of Coping Strategies on Perceived Stress and Hair Cortisol Levels During the COVID-19 Pandemic According to Sex.Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress · 2025Article
- Interpersonal physiological and psychological synchrony predict the social transmission of nocebo hyperalgesia between individuals.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Maternal attachment security modulates the relationship between vulnerability to anxiety and attentional bias to threat in healthy children.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Understanding Others' Distress Through Past Experiences: The Role of Memory Engram Cells in Observational Fear.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Review
- A proof-of-concept study of vicarious extinction learning and autonomic synchrony in parent-child dyads and posttraumatic stress disorder.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- When asking 'are you stressed?' is not enough: Hair cortisol, subjective stress, and alcohol use during the first year of the pandemic.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Article
- Pre-pandemic socio-emotional vulnerability, internalizing and externalizing symptoms predict changes in hair cortisol concentrations in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic in children.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2022Article
- Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A longitudinal investigation of psychological distress in children during COVID-19: the role of socio-emotional vulnerability.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2022Article
- Early life stress is associated with the default mode and fronto-limbic network connectivity among young adults.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Watch and Learn: Vicarious Threat Learning across Human Development.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Mental well-being during the first months of Covid-19 in adults and children: behavioral evidence and neural precursors.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Safety learning during development: Implications for development of psychopathology.Behavioural brain research · 2021Review
- Anxiety Sensitivity Moderates the Association Between Father-Child Relationship Security and Fear Transmission.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The biological mechanisms involved in fear transmission within families have been scarcely investigated in humans. Here we studied (1) how children acquired conditioned fear from observing their parent, or a stranger, being exposed to a fear conditioning paradigm, and (2) the subsequent fear extinction process in these children. Eighty-three child-parent dyads were recruited. The parent was filmed while undergoing a conditioning procedure where one cue was paired with a shock (CS + Parent) and one was not (CS -). Children (8 to 12 years old) watched this video and a video of an adult stranger who underwent conditioning with a different cue reinforced (CS + Stranger). Children were then exposed to all cues (no shocks were delivered) while skin conductance responses (SCR) were recorded. Children exhibited higher SCR to the CS + Parent and CS + Stranger relative to the CS -. Physiological synchronization between the child's SCR during observational learning and the parent's SCR during the actual process of fear conditioning predicted higher SCR for the child to the CS + Parent. Our data suggest that children acquire fear vicariously and this can be measured physiologically. These data lay the foundation to examine observational fear learning mechanisms that might contribute to fear and anxiety disorders transmission in clinically affected families.
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