Slow to warm up: the role of habituation in social fear.

ABSTRACT: Neural habituation allows familiar information to be ignored in favor of salient or novel stimuli. In contrast, failure to rapidly habituate likely reflects deficits in the ability to learn that an environment is predictable, familiar and safe. Differences in habituation rate may underlie individual differences in the tendency to approach or avoid novelty; however, many questions remain unanswered. Given the importance of adaptive social functioning, here we tested whether habituation differences to social stimuli are associated with differences in social fearfulness, a trait that ranges from low social fear-the adaptive tendency to approach novel social stimuli-to high social fear-the maladaptive tendency to avoid novel social stimuli. Higher social fearfulness was associated with slower

SUBMITTER: Avery SN 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5091686 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature