Novelty-facilitated extinction and the reinstatement of conditional human fear
Section snippets
Participants
Forty-eight university students and community members (mean age: M = 25.60, SD = 10.53, range: 18–62; 29 female) volunteered participation in exchange for course credit or AU$15 and provided informed consent. Participant numbers were based on the sample size used by Dunsmoor et al. (2015) for statistical analyses. Upon arrival at the laboratory participants were allocated to one of two groups, Novelty-Facilitated Extinction (NFE) or standard Extinction (EXT), alternatingly with the proviso of
Preliminary analyses
The two groups did not differ in gender ratio (female:male; NFE: 14:10; EXT: 15:9), number of contingency non-verbalisers (NFE: 5; EXT: 6), age (NFE: M = 26.17 years, SD = 11.87; EXT: M = 25.04 years, SD = 9.22), perceived unpleasantness of the electro-tactile stimulus (NFE: M = 5.83, SD = 1.09; EXT: M = 5.50, SD = 0.98), number of spontaneous SCRs during 3-min baseline (NFE: M = 34.29, SD = 18.60; EXT: M = 30.96, SD = 17.79), and IUS-12 scores (NFE: M = 2.67, SD = 0.87, range: 1.25–4.50; EXT: M
Supplementary analyses
The approach to conceptualize reinstatement used in the current study differs from that employed by Dunsmoor et al. (2015) who subjected responses to CS+ and CS− in the early phase of the reinstatement test (the first three trials of the reinstatement test respectively) to a Group × CS ANOVA and calculated a reinstatement index as a ratio of the mean SCR to the first three CS+ presentations during the reinstatement test divided by the largest SCR to a CS+ during acquisition. Like Dunsmoor et
Discussion
The current study aimed to conceptually replicate and extend the findings of Dunsmoor et al. (2015) who reported that return of fear is reduced after extinction training in which the CS+ is paired with a novel, non-aversive tone stimulus, novelty-facilitated extinction. Rather than using spontaneous recovery as an index of return of fear, the current study assessed the effects of novelty-facilitated extinction on reinstatement. Following three unpaired presentations of the unconditional
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by grants number DP120100750 and SR120300015 from the Australian Research Council.
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