ArticleScientific reports2022
Mental imagery can generate and regulate acquired differential fear conditioned reactivity.
Article in Scientific reports, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Imagining emotional events benefits future-oriented decisions.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2022Trial
- A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Time to think of love, leisure, terror, and despair: emotional imagery affects temporal cognition.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Both mental imagery and object-based attention regulate differential fear conditioning in the anterior insula.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity during extinction recall suggests successful extinction learning via mental imagery.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- It's all connected! Multivariate pattern analysis of inter-network connectivity distinguishes between reappraisal and passive viewing of emotional scenes.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Positive mental imagery, emotion regulation and depressive symptoms in individuals with alcohol use disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- The Organization of Anxiety Symptoms Along the Threat Imminence Continuum.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Conscious expectancy rather than associative strength elicits brain activity during single-cue fear conditioning.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Fear in the mind's eye: the neural correlates of differential fear acquisition to imagined conditioned stimuli.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Visualizing risky situations induces a stronger neural response in brain areas associated with mental imagery and emotions than visualizing non-risky situations.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Physiological and subjective arousal to prospective mental imagery: A mechanism for behavioral change?PloS one · 2023Article
- Fear in the Theater of the Mind: Differential Fear Conditioning With Imagined Stimuli.Psychological science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 5 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Mental imagery is an important tool in the cognitive control of emotion. The present study tests the prediction that visual imagery can generate and regulate differential fear conditioning via the activation and prioritization of stimulus representations in early visual cortices. We combined differential fear conditioning with manipulations of viewing and imagining basic visual stimuli in humans. We discovered that mental imagery of a fear-conditioned stimulus compared to imagery of a safe conditioned stimulus generated a significantly greater conditioned response as measured by self-reported fear, the skin conductance response, and right anterior insula activity (experiment 1). Moreover, mental imagery effectively down- and up-regulated the fear conditioned responses (experiment 2). Multivariate classification using the functional magnetic resonance imaging data from retinotopically defined early visual regions revealed significant decoding of the imagined stimuli in V2 and V3 (experiment 1) but significantly reduced decoding in these regions during imagery-based regulation (experiment 2). Together, the present findings indicate that mental imagery can generate and regulate a differential fear conditioned response via mechanisms of the depictive theory of imagery and the biased-competition theory of attention. These findings also highlight the potential importance of mental imagery in the manifestation and treatment of psychological illnesses.
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