Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Effects of Verbal Instructions on Fear Extinction and Extinction Retrieval in Patients with Anxiety Disorders and Healthy Controls

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Armin Zlomuzica¹ (armin.zlomuzica@rub.de), Annalisa Lipp¹, Christian Merz¹, Beray Macit¹, Marcella Woud², Oliver Wolf¹, Jürgen Margraf¹; ¹Ruhr University Bochum, ²University of Göttingen

Patients with anxiety disorders exhibit heightened conditionability, reflected in either an accelerated acquisition and/or a slower extinction of conditioned fear responses. Pathological anxiety is further associated with an attentional bias to negative stimuli. Verbal instructions (VI) stating that during fear extinction no UCS would be applied might be able to change this bias and help increase extinction learning. Several studies have shown that VI about CS–UCS contingencies administered prior to extinction training promote both fear extinction learning and extinction retrieval, although the effects of VI on extinction retrieval are inconclusive. We investigated whether VI provided prior to extinction training would lead to superior extinction learning in healthy controls as well as patients with anxiety disorders. We further explored whether VI provided after extinction training would improve extinction retrieval by diminishing conditioned fear responses and lead to superior effects in combination with VI delivered prior to extinction. N= 122 healthy controls and N=120 participants diagnosed with anxiety disorder were subjected to a 3-day fear conditioning paradigm and VI instructions were administered at several time points throughout the extinction learning and retrieval phase. Healthy controls as well as anxiety disorder patients seem to profit from VI and show superior extinction learning. Extinction retrieval was also improved by post-extinction VI while pre-extinction VI do not improve extinction retrieval. VI effects during reinstatement test were either diminished or vanished. Our findings provide potential implications for cognitive approaches aimed to increase current treatment options for anxiety disorders.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions