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      Fear Generalization and Anxiety: Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms.

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          Abstract

          Fear can be an adaptive emotion that helps defend against potential danger. Classical conditioning models elegantly describe how animals learn which stimuli in the environment signal danger, but understanding how this learning is generalized to other stimuli that resemble aspects of a learned threat remains a challenge. Critically, the overgeneralization of fear to harmless stimuli or situations is a burden to daily life and characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders. Here, we review emerging evidence on behavioral and neural mechanisms of generalization of emotional learning with the goal of encouraging further research on generalization in anxiety disorders. We begin by placing research on fear generalization in a rich historical context of stimulus generalization dating back to Pavlov, which lays the foundation for theoretical and experimental approaches used today. We then transition to contemporary behavioral and neurobiological research on generalization of emotional learning in humans and nonhuman animals and discuss the factors that promote generalization on the one hand from discrimination on the other hand.

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          Author and article information

          Journal
          Biol. Psychiatry
          Biological psychiatry
          1873-2402
          0006-3223
          Sep 1 2015
          : 78
          : 5
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Psychology Department and Center for Neural Sciences, New York University, New York, New York.. Electronic address: joseph.dunsmoor@nyu.edu.
          [2 ] Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
          Article
          S0006-3223(15)00318-2
          10.1016/j.biopsych.2015.04.010
          25981173
          6aa35121-c169-4ead-9c65-9e13ae18f6dd
          Copyright © 2015 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
          History

          Amygdala,Anxiety,Aversive-conditioning,Discrimination,Fear,Similarity,Specificity

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