ArticlePsychophysiology2022
Postural freezing relates to startle potentiation in a human fear-conditioning paradigm.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Selective orexin receptor cross-over treatment increases resilience and expression of neuroplastic signaling genes.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Uncovering Heart Rate Response Patterns to Threat Pictures Through Deep Latent Representation Learning with a Variational Autoencoder.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- How Temporal Predictability of Threat and Action Preparation Affect Defensive Freezing Responses.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- The threat sensitivity scale: A brief self-report measure of dispositional sensitivity toward perceiving threats to physical harm.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The neurocomputational link between defensive cardiac states and approach-avoidance arbitration under threat.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Unconditioned response to a naturally aversive stimulus is associated with sensitized defensive responding and self-reported fearful traits in a PTSD sample.Psychophysiology · 2024Article
- Neural patterns of threat response in adolescents predict vulnerability for and resilience against internalizing symptoms during COVID-19 waves.Neuroimage. Reports · 2023Article
- Understanding clinical fear and anxiety through the lens of human fear conditioning.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Review
- The elegant complexity of fear in non-human animals.Emerging topics in life sciences · 2022Article
- Stimulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex blocks the return of subcortically mediated fear responses.Translational psychiatry · 2022Article
- Freezing revisited: coordinated autonomic and central optimization of threat coping.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2022Review
- Postural freezing relates to startle potentiation in a human fear-conditioning paradigm.Psychophysiology · 2022Article
- Fear, defense, and emotion: A neuroethological understanding of the negative valence research domain criteria.The American psychologistArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Freezing to impending threat is a core defensive response. It has been studied primarily using fear conditioning in non-human animals, thwarting advances in translational human anxiety research that has used other indices, such as skin conductance responses. Here we examine postural freezing as a human conditioning index for translational anxiety research. We employed a mixed cued/contextual fear-conditioning paradigm where one context signals the occurrence of the US upon the presentation of the CS, and another context signals that the CS is not followed by the US. Critically, during the following generalization phase, the CS is presented in a third and novel context. We show that human freezing is highly sensitive to fear conditioning, generalizes to ambiguous contexts, and amplifies with threat imminence. Intriguingly, stronger parasympathetically driven freezing under threat, but not sympathetically mediated skin conductance, predicts subsequent startle magnitude. These results demonstrate that humans show fear-conditioned animal-like freezing responses, known to aid in active preparation for unexpected attack, and that freezing captures real-life anxiety expression. Conditioned freezing offers a promising new, non-invasive, and continuous, readout for human fear conditioning, paving the way for future translational studies into human fear and anxiety.
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.