ArticleTranslational psychiatry2022
Stimulation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex blocks the return of subcortically mediated fear responses.
Article in Translational psychiatry, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Frontopolar multifocal transcranial direct current stimulation reduces conditioned fear reactivity during extinction training: A pilot randomized controlled trial.Neurobiology of learning and memory · 2023Trial
- Cardiac vagal activity during in-vivo threat exposure is associated with within-session inhibition of fear and avoidance.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex attenuates the link between physiological heart rate reactions to unfairness and value computations in normative decision making.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- How Fear Memory is Updated: From Reconsolidation to Extinction?Neuroscience bulletin · 2025Review
- Infralimbic Projections to the Substantia Innominata-Ventral Pallidum Constrain Defensive Behavior during Extinction Learning.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Ready for translation: non-invasive auricular vagus nerve stimulation inhibits psychophysiological indices of stimulus-specific fear and facilitates responding to repeated exposure in phobic individuals.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- A vagal route to memory: evidence from invasive and non-invasive electrical vagus nerve stimulation studies and areas for future clinical application.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) mediates the inhibition of defensive responses upon encounters of cues, that had lost their attribute as a threat signal via previous extinction learning. Here, we investigated whether such fear extinction recall can be facilitated by anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Extinction recall was tested twenty-four hours after previously acquired fear was extinguished. Either anodal tDCS or sham stimulation targeting the vmPFC was applied during this test. After stimulation ceased, we examined return of fear after subjects had been re-exposed to aversive events. Fear was assessed by reports of threat expectancy and modulations of autonomic (skin conductance, heart rate) and protective reflex (startle potentiation) measures, the latter of which are mediated by subcortical defense circuits. While tDCS did not affect initial extinction recall, it abolished the return of startle potentiation and autonomic components of the fear response. Results suggest hierarchical multi-level vmPFC functions in human fear inhibition and indicate, that its stimulation might immunize against relapses into pathological subcortically mediated defensive activation.
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