Journal
BEHAVIOUR RESEARCH AND THERAPY
Volume 139, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2021.103818
Keywords
Threat acquisition; Extinction learning; Extinction retention; Social anxiety; Intolerance of uncertainty; Skin conductance
Categories
Funding
- Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Studentship [ES/J500148/1]
- NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation [27567]
- ESRC [ES/R01145/1]
- ESRC [ES/R011451/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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The research indicates that compromised threat extinction is more likely related to high levels of Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) rather than social anxiety. High IU may be associated with impaired extinction learning and retention processes.
Extinction-resistant threat is regarded as a central hallmark of pathological anxiety. However, it remains relatively under-studied in social anxiety. Here we sought to determine whether self-reported trait social anxiety is associated with compromised threat extinction learning and retention. We tested this hypothesis within two separate, socially relevant conditioning studies. In the first experiment, a Selective Extinction Through Cognitive Evaluation (SECE) paradigm was used, which included a cognitive component during the extinction phase, while experiment 2 used a traditional threat extinction paradigm. Skin conductance responses and subjective ratings of anxiety (experiment 1 and 2) and expectancy (experiment 2) were collected across both experiments. The findings of both studies demonstrated no effect of social anxiety on extinction learning or retention. Instead, results from experiment 1 indicated that individual differences in Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) were associated with the ability to use contextual cues to decrease a conditioned response during SECE. However, during extinction retention, high IU predicted greater generalisation across context cues. Findings of experiment 2 revealed that higher IU was associated with impaired extinction learning and retention. The results from both studies suggest that compromised threat extinction is likely to be a characteristic of high levels of IU and not social anxiety.
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