Glotzbach-Schoon, Evelyn and Andreatta, Marta and Muehlberger, Andreas and Pauli, Paul (2013) Context conditioning in virtual reality as a model for pathological anxiety. NEUROFORUM, 19 (3). pp. 110-117. ISSN 0947-0875,
Full text not available from this repository. (Request a copy)Abstract
Phobic fear which is triggered by specific stimuli can be modeled experimentally through cue conditioning. In contrast, context conditioning may serve as a model for anxiety which is longer lasting and unrelated to cues. Such context conditioning can be studied in humans in analogy to animal studies by using virtual reality (VR). Our VR context conditioning paradigm realizes virtual offices as contexts. One office becomes the anxiety context since participants receive unpredictable mildy painful electric stimulations. The other office becomes the safety context because no aversive stimulation is delivered while participants explore this office. The validity of the paradigm is indicated by findings that after conditioning participants rate the virtual anxiety context as anxiety eliciting, avoid this context, and show startle potentiation in this context. Our studies further revealed that known risk factors for anxiety disorders affect context conditioning. We found that enhanced trait anxiety facilitates contextual fear conditioning. In addition, we observed that persons with genetic risks for anxiety disorders learn context conditioning very effectively as shown in startle potentiation. These findings suggest that in individuals vulnerable to anxiety disorders such as panic disorder or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) context conditioning may have contributed to the development of these disorder.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | FEAR; ENVIRONMENT; AVOIDANCE; DISORDER; BEHAVIOR; fear; anxiety; conditioning; virtual reality |
| Subjects: | 100 Philosophy & psychology > 150 Psychology |
| Divisions: | Human Sciences > Institut für Psychologie |
| Depositing User: | Dr. Gernot Deinzer |
| Date Deposited: | 02 Apr 2020 05:18 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Apr 2020 05:18 |
| URI: | https://pred.uni-regensburg.de/id/eprint/16139 |
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