Can Novelty Help Us Let Go of Fear? Exploring the Effect of Novelty on Fear Extinction.

Novelty can be defined as a motivationally and attentionally salient learning signal. Past research has found benefits of novelty to include increased plasticity and enhanced memory encoding. Briefly exposing subjects to a novel stimulus or environment in place of an expected threat has also been shown to enhance the extinction process following fear conditioning in both rodents and humans. This is important, as the treatment for trauma-based disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has only been demonstrated effective for up to 66% of those affected and a dysfunction in the fear extinction process appears central in the development and continuation of such disorders. The current study explored whether replacing a fear-inducing stimulus with a novel visual stimulus resulted in more effective fear extinction, as quantified using both subjective and objective parameters, namely subjective arousal, and pupil dilation. In addition, a condition with olfactory novelty was...Show moreNovelty can be defined as a motivationally and attentionally salient learning signal. Past research has found benefits of novelty to include increased plasticity and enhanced memory encoding. Briefly exposing subjects to a novel stimulus or environment in place of an expected threat has also been shown to enhance the extinction process following fear conditioning in both rodents and humans. This is important, as the treatment for trauma-based disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has only been demonstrated effective for up to 66% of those affected and a dysfunction in the fear extinction process appears central in the development and continuation of such disorders. The current study explored whether replacing a fear-inducing stimulus with a novel visual stimulus resulted in more effective fear extinction, as quantified using both subjective and objective parameters, namely subjective arousal, and pupil dilation. In addition, a condition with olfactory novelty was included to explore the effects of contextual novelty on preventing the reinstatement of the conditioned fear 24 hours following fear conditioning. The study successfully established fear conditioning using threatening visual stimuli in a classical conditioning paradigm. However, there was no support for novelty-enhanced fear extinction, nor for the benefit of olfactory novelty on the retention of fear extinction 24 hours post-extinction. Rather, an increase in pupil dilation in the context of a novel olfactory environment was found especially in conditions where a fear-inducing unconditioned stimulus had been paired with a novel replacement stimulus, possibly suggesting a contextual novelty-induced fear reinstatement effect.Show less

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Can Novelty Help Us Let Go of Fear? Exploring the Effect of Novelty on Fear Extinction.