ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2024
Social support and fear-inhibition: an examination of underlying neural mechanisms.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- The social life of Pavlovian learning.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Sex/gender differences in orbitofrontal cortex reactivity underlying the associations between stress, social relationships, and problematic alcohol use.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Building a social brain: Cells, circuits and behavior across the lifespan.Neurobiology of stress · 2025Review
- Social Buffering of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Longitudinal Effects and Neural Mediators.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Construction and validation of the prediction model for fear of cancer recurrence in patients with postoperative cervical cancer.Frontiers in oncology · 2025Article
- Loneliness and the persistence of fear: Perceived social isolation reduces evaluative fear extinction.PloS one · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Recent work has demonstrated that reminders of those we are closest to have a unique combination of effects on fear learning and represent a new category of fear inhibitors, termed prepared fear suppressors. Notably, social-support-figure images have been shown to resist becoming associated with fear, suppress conditional-fear-responding and lead to long-term fear reduction. Due to the novelty of this category, understanding the underlying neural mechanisms that support these unique abilities of social-support-reminders has yet to be investigated. Here, we examined the neural correlates that enable social-support-reminders to resist becoming associated with fear during a retardation-of-acquisition test. We found that social-support-figure-images (vs stranger-images) were less readily associated with fear, replicating prior work, and that this effect was associated with decreased amygdala activity and increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) activity for social-support-figure-images (vs stranger-images), suggesting that social-support-engagement of the VMPFC and consequent inhibition of the amygdala may contribute to unique their inhibitory effects. Connectivity analyses supported this interpretation, showing greater connectivity between the VMPFC and left amygdala for social-support-figure-images (vs stranger-images).
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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.