Cognitive bias during associative threat and safety learning: Neurophysiological markers and possible interventions

• Applicant: Dr. Julian Wiemer
• Subject Area: Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 378414384

Anxiety disorders can be treated successfully with exposure therapy, but not all patients profit on the long run. Current meta-analyses suggest that patients with anxiety disorders have difficulties in safety learning. That is, threat is overestimated and fear responding is enhanced towards stimuli which are not associated with threat. This impairment complicates exposure therapy, in which patients are confronted with safe but feared stimuli. According to current considerations, the success of exposure therapy depends crucially on cognitive processes, especially on expectancy violations. The aim of this project is to find out when these crucial cognitive processes take place, which brain regions are involved and how we can modulate them in a way that will improve therapy outcome for anxiety disorders. It is hypothesized that successful safety learning depends on the attentional processing of safe consequences, and that attentional allocation can have a beneficial influence on safety learning and on the generalization of fear to other stimuli. In order to understand these processes as comprehensively as possible, they will be measured on multiple levels (memory, ratings, neurophysiology, peripheral physiology). To this end, first, the subsequent memory paradigm will be used to find out which electrophysiological potentials predict, whether one can remember the fact that certain neutral stimuli are associated with threat, while others are associated with the omission of threat. It is assumed that especially the P3 to the omission of threat will predict successful safety learning. In another experiment, it will be investigated whether these neurophysiological responses are reduced in patients with panic disorder during associative threat learning and its generalization to other stimuli, which would be an explanation for deficient safety learning. In order to test the causal impact of such cognitive processes, it will be further examined whether the allocation of attention on threat, resp. on the omission of threat, will have an influence on associative threat learning, on its generalization to other stimuli and on the P3. Finally, with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging, it will be analyzed, which brain regions are activated during the omission of threat and which predict successful safety learning. These insights will broaden our understanding of successful safety learning and its underlying neural correlates. Moreover, the experiments will help to develop simple cognitive strategies aiming at the improvement of safety learning.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Paul Pauli