Neural Correlates of Human Fear Conditioning and Sources of Variability

Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre 

Fear conditioning, also known as threat conditioning, is a psychological paradigm developed over a century ago, which models how the association between an initially neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) and an innately aversive stimulus (unconditioned stimulus, US) is learned. It remains one of the most widely used and productive experimental models for investigating both normal and pathological fear and anxiety in humans (Beckers,
et al., 2023). Differences between the findings of prior studies, may be explained by individual differences, such as sociodemographic factors (e.g., age) and trait variables (e.g., trait anxiety), or task-specific variables, such as task instructions or the choice of aversive stimuli, that differ between studies, and are likely to modulate the neural correlates of fear conditioning (Lonsdorf et al., 2017).