Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Fear Conditioning and Vulnerability to Anxiety

A commentary on Fear-conditioning mechanisms associated with trait vulnerability to anxiety in human

States of epistemic curiosity interfere with memory for incidental scholastic facts

Curiosity can be a powerful motivator to learn and retain new information. Evidence shows that high states of curiosity elicited by a specific source (i.e., a trivia question) can promote memory for incidental stimuli (non-target) presented close in time. The spreading effect of curiosity states on memory for other information has potential for educational applications. Specifically, it could provide techniques to improve learning for information that did not spark a sense of curiosity on its own. Here, we investigated how high states of curiosity induced through trivia questions affect memory performance for unrelated scholastic facts (e.g., scientific, English, or historical facts) presented in close temporal proximity to the trivia question. Across three task versions, participants viewed trivia questions closely followed in time by a scholastic fact unrelated to the trivia question, either just prior to or immediately following the answer to the trivia question. Participants then completed a surprise multiple-choice memory test (akin to a pop quiz) for the scholastic material. In all three task versions, memory performance was poorer for scholastic facts presented after trivia questions that had elicited high versus low levels of curiosity. These results contradict previous findings showing curiosity-enhanced memory for incidentally presented visual stimuli and suggest that target information that generates a high-curiosity state interferes with encoding complex and unrelated scholastic facts presented close in time

Going Viral: How Fear, Socio-Cognitive Polarization and Problem-Solving Influence Fake News Detection and Proliferation During COVID-19 Pandemic

In times of uncertainty, people often seek out information to help alleviate fear, possibly leaving them vulnerable to false information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we attended to a viral spread of incorrect and misleading information that compromised collective actions and public health measures to contain the spread of the disease. We investigated the influence of fear of COVID-19 on social and cognitive factors including believing in fake news, bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, and problem-solving—within two of the populations that have been severely hit by COVID-19: Italy and the United States of America. To gain a better understanding of the role of misinformation during the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we also investigated whether problem-solving ability and socio-cognitive polarization were associated with believing in fake news. Results showed that fear of COVID-19 is related to seeking out information about the virus and avoiding infection in the Italian and American samples, as well as a willingness to share real news (COVID and non-COVID-related) headlines in the American sample. However, fear positively correlated with bullshit receptivity, suggesting that the pandemic might have contributed to creating a situation where people were pushed toward pseudo-profound existential beliefs. Furthermore, problem-solving ability was associated with correctly discerning real or fake news, whereas socio-cognitive polarization was the strongest predictor of believing in fake news in both samples. From these results, we concluded that a construct reflecting cognitive rigidity, neglecting alternative information, and black-and-white thinking negatively predicts the ability to discern fake from real news. Such a construct extends also to reasoning processes based on thinking outside the box and considering alternative information such as problem-solving

Test-Retest of Threat Acquisition and Generalization

test-retest analyses on data from WV

Emotional learning retroactively enhances item memory but distorts source attributions

An adaptive memory system should prioritize select information surrounding a powerful learning event that may prove useful for predicting future meaningful events. The behavioral tagging hypothesis provides a mechanistic framework to interpret how weak experiences persist as durable memories through temporal association with a strong experience. Importantly, memories are composed of multiple elements, and different mnemonic aspects of the same experience may be uniquely affected by mechanisms that retroactively modulate weakly encoded memory. Here we investigated how emotional learning affects item and source memory for related events encoded close in time. Participants encoded trial-unique category exemplars before, during, and after Pavlovian fear conditioning. Results showed selective retroactive enhancements in 24-hour item memory were accompanied by a bias to misattribute items to the temporal context of fear conditioning. The strength of this source memory bias correlated with participants’ retroactive item memory enhancement, and source misattribution to the emotional context predicted whether items were remembered overall. In the framework of behavioral tagging: memory attribution was biased to the temporal context of the stronger event (fear conditioning) that provided the putative source of memory stabilization for the weaker event (non-emotional learning). We additionally found that fear conditioning selectively and retroactively enhanced stimulus typicality ratings for related items, and that stimulus typicality also predicted overall item memory. Collectively, these results provide new evidence that items related to an emotional event are misattributed to the temporal context of the emotional event and judged to be more representative of their semantic category. Both processes may help facilitate memory retrieval for related events encoded close in time

The impact of prior and ongoing threat on the false alarm threshold for facial discrimination

Perceptual adaptations facilitate rapid responses to threats but can come with the cost of false alarms, or the failure to discriminate safe or novel stimuli from signals of true threat. For example, a fatigued colleague might be avoided when their tired expression is interpreted as a scowl, or a glimpse at a stranger might cause a rush of anxiety if they resemble a known adversary. We examined false alarms in the context of facial cues, which can become exaggerated signals of threat across anxiety disorders. In Experiment 1, ongoing threat lowered the false alarm threshold for discrimination based on anger intensity compared to prior and no threat. In Experiment 2, prior and ongoing threat each lowered the false alarm threshold for identity-based facial discrimination compared to no threat. These results could be relevant for anxiety disorders in which excessive false alarms may contribute to overgeneralized threat responses

CC-ALLEX: Counterconditioning and contextual renewal in a Web-based causal learning task

Counter Conditioning Allergy Extinction (CC-ALLEX) project from Dunsmoor la