L8: Deconstructing Fear Memory

Question 1

Why do people look for threatening stimuli in their environment after a traumatic experience

Answer 1

Because they feel that this helps them to predict and control the environment and hopefully prevent another such experience

Question 2

What are 4 ways in which fear can return

Answer 2

• spontaneous recovery = passage of time
• reinstatement = re-exposure to aversive event
• renewal = leaving the therapeutic context; when context changes from the context in which the fear was extinguished, or when you go back to the acquisition context, the fear may return
• rapid reacquuisiton = new learning experience

Question 3

Explain the process of memory reconsolidation

Answer 3

New learning (active) —> consolidation —> stored memory (inactive) —> memory reactivation —> labile memory (active) —> reconsolidation —> updated memory (inactive)

Question 4

What is most important for saving memories in long-term memory

Answer 4

Protein-synthesis

Question 5

What are 8 therapeutic strategies for enhancing inhibitory learning and its retrieval

Answer 5

1. Expectancy violation = violate the expectancy of the outcome of the participant
2. Deepened extinction = either multiple fear CS’s are first extinguished separately before being combined during extinction, or a previously extinguished cue is paired with a novel CS
3. Occasional reinforced extinction = occasional CS-US pairings
4. Removal of safety signals
5. Variability = variability in intensity, duration, stimuli
6. Retrieval cues = can be included to enhance retrieval of extinction learning and offsetting context renewal
7. Multiple contexts = conducting exposures in multiple different contexts
8. Reconsolidation = retrieving already stored memories and changing them before they are restored in long-term memory

Question 6

What is important in optimizing exposure treatment (3 aspects)

Answer 6

It should violate expectancies in 3 ways:
- probability of negative outcome (US)
- intensity of anticipated catastrophe
- extent to which catastrophe is manageable

Question 7

What are 3 necessary conditions to trigger reconsolidation

Answer 7

• propranolol needs to be given directly after reactivation
• there needs to be reactivation
• there needs to be negative prediction error, which means that theres a difference between the expectancy and the outcome (expectancy violation)

Question 8

Explain the inhibitory learning model of extinction

Answer 8

Based on extinction; CS is repeatedly presented in absence of US —> original CS-US association (excitatory meaning) remains but a new CS-no US association (inhibitory meaning) develops
—> fear can come back easily because the excitatory meaning still exists