Exposure therapy for the treatment of anxiety is considered one of the most effective and reliable approaches in psychotherapy. Anyone who comes into contact with the anxiety-inducing stimulus as part of the therapy can expect to “unlearn” the anxiety quickly. Nevertheless, the anxiety may return. This is partly due to insufficient generalization of the unlearned fear. Bianca Hagedorn (A09) is researching how this could be counteracted in her project: “The generalization of safety signals”. She describes her project as follows:

Fear generalization after the encounter of an aversive event is common: After being bitten by a dog, an individual does not only develop fear responses to this specific dog but to similar looking dogs or even the whole category of dogs. However, exposure therapy based on extinction learning that is realized with solely the feared dog might diminish the fear expressed to this specific dog but no other dog. Extinction generalization aims to overcome this caveat by incorporating similar generalization stimuli into the process of learning that a feared stimulus is no longer fearful. Thus, extinction of fear responses can generalize across a variety of related stimuli like the whole category of dogs. However, the concrete mechanism driving this effect remains elusive. Consequently, this study aims to investigate the underlying mechanisms of generalization processes not only for extinction processes but critically also for safety signals. Although the absence of safety signal generalization might state an evolutionary adaptive process, fear overgeneralization in combination with missing generalization of safety signals might contribute to the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Thus, the generalization of extinction learning and safety signals might provide approaches to be incorporated in exposure therapy.

The SFB 1280 has set up a budget for its young scientists to realize their own research ideas. We use the “treasure chest” to finance convincing and independent study concepts of our early career researchers.