Project Title
Shortening representations facilitates fear extinction.
Behavioral change(s) addressed
Therapeutic intervention aims to extinct threat responses by exposing patients to safe experiences with similar stimuli, with the hope that this extinction would generalize to other triggering stimuli. But such generalization is often hard to achieve, and the original aversive response re-emerges when they find themselves in a similar situation. What causes this lack of generalization for anxious patients is unclear. In our project, we aim to test a novel mechanism that could explain this reduced generalization for positive experiences, which will help create new intervention for clinicians in the future.
Theoretical approach
It is based on my previous work, where we showed that uncertainty aversion, a personality trait concomitant with generalized anxiety, produces an expansion of people’s semantic representations, making each concept more distinct (Vives et al., 2023). Uncertainty-averse individuals treat both abstract (freedom, opportunity) and concrete (chair, stool) concepts as more dissimilar, which influences their generalization: what they learn from a chair, it applies less to a stool. This higher dissimilarity in their representational structure could explain why anxious people struggle with generalizing the extinction of their threat responses.
Empirical research strategies
To conduct laboratory experiments with people who suffer from anxiety disorders and manipulate the structure of their mental representations (if they perceive stimuli as more or less similar) to elucidate if then they generalize extinction more.
Possibilities for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration
The project has already allowed for an interdisciplinary collaboration between cognitive neuroscientists, social psychologists, and clinical psychologists.
Social transition(s) addressed
A heightened fear response to stimuli associated with perceived threats is a key feature of anxiety disorders. This project is addressed to help create better interventions for the treatment of anxiety disorders, a crucial issue for STAB.