Extinguishing Conditioned Fear Responses

Before discussing how to extinguish classically conditioned responses to fear, we ought to discuss conditioning. Classical conditioning is most often referenced with Pavlov’s experiments with animal’s learned responses to regular stimuli. Regularly introducing stimuli and associating it with positive or negative feedback creates conditioning in animals. For example, in the experiments, Pavlov rang a bell before giving his dogs a treat. Consistently doing this allowed him to ring the bell and realize that the dogs salivated in expectation of a treat. Their expectation is a conditional response (Friedman & Schustack, 2016). 

            To elaborate, consider when a neutral stimulus is presented to a person, it creates neither positive nor negative reactions. Subsequently, when a second stimulus known as the unconditioned stimulus is presented to the person, it creates a positive or negative response. In the previous example, the bell is the neutral stimulus and the treat is positive.  The stimuli pairing create a conditioned response for as long as the stimuli are evoked. However, the conditioned response might fade over time if it is not evoked regularly, this does not include critical emotions associated with survival, in most cases, such as fear or hunger. 

Best  Methods

            Conditioned responses are understood to occur more quickly when involving traumatic or excessively painful stimuli. Consider, for example, a person who has been involved in a car accident. When revisiting or driving through the same area of the accident they might become anxious or hyperaware. This is a learned reaction, a conditioned response, to the location or unconditioned stimuli. However, when the person drives through the same location a few more times and nothing terrible happens to them, their anxiety subsides. This is known as an extinction of the conditioned response. It is also the best method to alleviate the feeling of fear and to inspire trust in the involved elements once more.  In other words, exposing the person to the conditioning stimulus slowly can help desensitize them. This method is used in the treatment of phobias, such as fear of heights or dogs.

            Extinguishing naturally occurring conditioned responses may prove especially difficult predominantly because humans and animals are prone to avoid situations that make them feel uncomfortable or cause them pain (Friedman & Schustack, 2016).

            Purposeful disassociation of the paired stimuli is another method that is generally accepted as more effective (Mickley et. al., 2009). For example, Mickley et. al. (2009) created a conditioned response in rats to a novel taste. Thereafter, they divided the rats into an extinction only group and an explicitly unpaired group. In the latter group, the rats alternated exposure to the neutral stimulus (extinction) to exposure of unconditioned stimulus (nausea) without the neutral stimulus, on different days. The results revealed that not only did the explicitly unpaired group exhibit extinction more quickly than the other group, they also did not exhibit any spontaneous recovery effects.

            The result of this research is especially meaningful because it suggests another avenue of treatment to reduce conditioned responses. However, human trials would be would not be recommended because exposing humans to alternate exposure of a conditioned stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus that produces physically, mentally or emotionally harmful responses is unethical.

Need for External Intervention

            As was briefly explained, people with conditioned fear responses may experience periodic spontaneous recovery but will most likely return to their conditioned state if presented with the condition unalleviated. On their own, this is a fixed state. External intervention is the best way to inspire trust and train, teach or desensitize a person away from the trained fear.

Reference

Friedman, H. S. & Schustack, M. W. (2016). Personality: Classic theories and modern research (6th ed.). MA: Pearson

Mickley, G. A., DiSorbo, A., Wilson, G. N., Huffman, J., Bacik, S., Hoxha, Z., ... & Kim, Y. H. (2009). Explicit disassociation of a conditioned stimulus and unconditioned stimulus during extinction training reduces both time to asymptotic extinction and spontaneous recovery of a conditioned taste aversion. Learning and motivation, 40(2), 209-220.