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ABSTRACT
Previous research in extinction indicates no difference in US expectancies for aversive and non-aversive unconditioned stimuli (USs). In this study, we bridged these topics by examining how concurrent perceptual and conceptual cues influence conditioned generalisation of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) patients by using non-aversive USs. The study included two consecutive phases: acquisition and generalisation. In the acquisition phase, we used blue and purple images as the perceptually conditioned stimuli, images of animals and household items as the conceptually conditioned stimuli, and non-aversive images as unconditioned stimuli (US). In the generalisation phase, we used images containing both conceptual and perceptual cues (e.g. blue animals) as the generalisation stimuli. Participants rated the US expectancy for all images. We found that compared with the control group, the patients exhibited generalisation in response to stimuli that included conditional conceptual cues. These results reveal novel evidence of generalisation in GAD and may have implications for considering the concept-based information in extinction treatment.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, Grant Numbers, 31871130), the Guangdong Key Project in “Development of new tools for diagnosis and treatment of Autism” (2018B030335001), Shenzhen Peacock Plan (KQTD2015033016104926).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In this experiment, we intentionally used moderately (instead of highly) fearful images as US to limit their negative impact on the patients with GAD. This might have led to a weakened effectiveness of US. See the detailed discussion regarding the use of images in the Discussion.