Threat appraisal during extinction recall in pediatric and adult anxiety disorders: an fMRI replication study

Authors

• MJ Farber
• AL Gold
• JC Britton
• E Ronkin
• E Leibenluft
• DS Pine

Abstract

In a recent study, anxious and healthy groups differed in self-reported anxiety but not physiological arousal during fear conditioning and extinction, and showed age-specific dysfunction in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during later extinction recall (Britton et al, 2013). The present study aims to replicate these analyses in an independent sample of anxious and healthy individuals. Participants (adults: 37 healthy, 28 anxious; children: 21 healthy, 29 anxious) completed a fear conditioning paradigm and extinction recall task on separate visits. Participants first completed fear conditioning and extinction while subjective ratings, skin conductance response (SCR), and startle electromyography (EMG) measures were collected. At the fMRI visit 10-30 days later, participants completed an extinction recall task in which they viewed images of the CS+, CS-, and a series of morphs resembling the faces. Subjects then rated the images during two discrete attention conditions. Conditioning and extinction were evidenced by significant phase-by-stimulus interaction effects for SCR [p=0.033], EMG [p

Scientific Focus Area: Neuroscience

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