Generalized anxiety disorder is associated with overgeneralization of classically conditioned fear.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Meta-analytic results of fear-conditioning studies in the anxiety disorders implicate generalization of conditioned fear to stimuli resembling the conditioned danger cue as one of the more robust conditioning markers of anxiety pathology. Due to the absence of conditioning studies assessing generalization in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), results of this meta-analysis do not reveal whether such generalization abnormalities also apply to GAD. The current study fills this gap by behaviorally and psychophysiologically assessing levels of conditioned fear generalization across adults with and without GAD.

Methods

Twenty-two patients with a DSM-IV-Text Revision diagnosis of GAD and 26 healthy comparison subjects were recruited and tested. The employed generalizati

SUBMITTER: Lissek S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3938992 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature