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Commentary for the Many Analysts Religion Project.

Contextual overgeneralization of emotional memory is believed to be a core aspect of affective disorders. Identifying methods to restrict emotional memory activation to its original encoding context is therefore of significant clinical interest. Preliminary evidence from rodent research points to a promising approach: reexposure to the context in which fear conditioning took place seems to reduce fear generalization to other contexts. However, it remains unknown which mechanisms underlie these effects, even though such fundamental knowledge is crucial for successful translation to interventions. Importantly, exposure to a context that resembles – but is not identical to – the encoding context may lead to diminished contextual dependency of memory by integration of additional contextual cues. Here, we therefore assessed in a large-scale study (N=180) whether reexposure to the encoding context enhances contextual dependency of episodic memory and whether exposure to a similar context impairs it. We also tested whether such effects are predicted by the strength of memory retrieval during context (re)exposure. The results showed that correct recognition depends on context and that such contextual dependency is lower for emotional than neutral memories, which replicates prior research. However, exposure to the encoding context or a similar context did not affect contextual dependency of emotional or neutral memory. Also, retrieval strength did not predict any effects. Thorough insight into factors underlying the effects of context (re)exposure on contextual dependency seems key to eventually attain a therapeutic memory recontextualization intervention

Preregistration of research plans is becoming an increasingly popular and common tool to enhance the transparency of a study’s methodology. In a preregistration, researchers document their research plans and register them to a public repository prior to conducting their research. In this chapter, we provide arguments for why preregistration can protect scientific findings against Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), such as outcome swapping, selective reporting of conditions, unwarranted data exclusions, and post-hoc changing of hypotheses. Furthermore, we place particular emphasis on preregistering research plans when using existing data and we give an overview of preregistration templates and public repositories for different types of research designs. We conclude this chapter with highlighting some of the common criticisms of preregistration and our counter-arguments, and provide future reflections.

{PREPRINT} Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), such as p-hacking (i.e., the inappropriate manipulation of data analysis to find statistical significance) and post-hoc hypothesizing, are threats to replicability of research findings. One key solution to the problem of QRPs is pre- registration. This refers to time-stamped documentation that describes the methodology and statistical analyses of a study before the data are collected or inspected. As such, readers of the study’s report can evaluate whether the described research is in line with the planned methods and analyses or there are deviations from these (e.g., analyses performed so that the research hypotheses is confirmed). Here, we aim to describe what preregistration entails and why it is useful for psychology research. In this vein, we present the key elements of a sufficient preregistration file, its advantages, as well as its disadvantages, and why preregistration is a key, yet partially insufficient, solution against QRPs. By the end of this chapter, we hope that readers are convinced that there is little reason not to preregister their research.

The relation between religiosity and well-being is one of the most researched topics in the psychology of religion, yet the directionality and robustness of the effect remains debated. Here, we adopted a many-analysts approach to assess the robustness of this relation based on a new cross-cultural dataset (N = 10, 535 participants from 24 countries). We recruited 120 analysis teams to investigate (1) whether religious people self-report higher well-being, and (2) whether the relation between religiosity and self-reported well-being depends on perceived cultural norms of religion (i.e., whether it is considered normal and desirable to be religious in a given country). In a two-stage procedure, the teams first created an analysis plan and then executed their planned analysis on the data. For the first research question, all but 3 teams reported positive effect sizes with credible/confidence intervals excluding zero (median reported beta = 0.120). For the second research question, this was the case for 65% of the teams (median reported beta = 0.039). While most teams applied (multilevel) linear regression models, there was considerable variability in the choice of items used to construct the independent variables, the dependent variable, and the included covariates. Funding: Australian Research Council [DP180102384]; Cogito Foundation [R10917]; French Agence Nationale de la Recherche [17-EURE-0017, 10-IDEX-0001-02]; National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [GR100544, DGE-2139841]; Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [406-17-568, 016.Vici.170.083, 016.Vidi.188.001]; John Templeton Foundation [60663]; Templeton Religion Trust [TRT 0154]; German Research Foundation [GRK 2277]

Objective: Generalization of conditioned fear is adaptive in some situations but maladaptive when fear excessively generalizes to innocuous stimuli with incidental resemblance to a genuine threat cue. Recently, empirical interest in fear generalization as a transdiagnostic explanatory mechanism underlying anxiety-related disorders has accelerated. As there are now several studies of fear generalization across multiple types of anxiety-related disorders, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of studies reporting behavioral measures (subjective ratings and psychophysiological indices) of fear generalization in anxiety-related disorder vs. comparison groups.Method: We conducted systematic searches of electronic databases (conducted from January-October 2020) for fear generalization studies involving anxiety-related disorder groups or subclinical analogue groups. A total of 300 records were full-text screened and two unpublished datasets were obtained, yielding 16 studies reporting behavioral fear generalization. Random-effects meta-analytic models and meta-regressions were applied to the behavioral data.Results: Fear generalization was significantly heightened in anxiety-related disorder participants (N=439) relative to comparison participants (N=428). We did not identify any significant clinical, sample, or methodological moderators. Conclusion: Heightened fear generalization is quantitatively supported as distinguishing anxiety-related disorder groups from comparison groups. Evidence suggests this effect is transdiagnostic, relatively robust to experimental or sample parameters, and that generalization paradigms are a well-supported framework for neurobehavioral investigations of learning and emotion in anxiety-related disorders. We discuss these findings in the context of prior meta-analyses and future directions and challenges for the field.

Freezing to impending threat is a core defensive response. It has been studied primarily using fear-conditioning in non-human animals, thwarting advances in translational human anxiety-research. Here we examine postural freezing as a human conditioning-index for translational anxiety-research. We show (n=28) that human freezing is highly sensitive to fear-conditioning, generalizes to ambiguous contexts, and amplifies with threat-imminence. Intriguingly, stronger parasympathetically-driven freezing under threat, but not sympathetically-mediated skin conductance, predicts subsequent startle magnitude. These results demonstrate that humans show fear-conditioned animal-like freezing responses, known to aid in active preparation for unexpected attack, and that freezing captures real-life anxiety-expression. Conditioned freezing offers a promising new, non-invasive, and continuous, readout for human fear-conditioning, paving the way for future translational studies into human fear and anxiety.

BACKGROUND: Real-time control of goal-directed actions requires continuous adjustments in response both to current error (i.e. distance from goal state) and predicted future error. Proportion-integral-derivative (PID) control models, which are extensively used in the automated control of industrial processes, formalize this intuition. Previous computational approaches to anxiety have separately addressed behavioral inhibition and exaggerated error processing, but a PID control approach decomposing error processing into current and anticipated error could integrate these accounts and extend them to a real-time sensorimotor control domain. METHODS: We applied a simplified proportion-derivative (PD) control model to a virtual driving task in a transdiagnostic psychiatric sample of 317 individuals and computed a drive parameter (weighting of current error) and a damping parameter (weighting of the rate of change of error, enabling adjustment based on future error). RESULTS: Self-reported fear but not negative affect was selectively associated with lower drive and lower damping. Those individuals that were characterized by lower drive and damping also exhibited lower caudal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) but not insula volume in a structural MRI analysis. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, the PD control approach reveals that fear is specifically associated with reduced weighting of current error and overestimation of future error, resulting in both approach inhibition and in overcorrecting overshoots around a goal state.

There is an increased interest in how excessive avoidance can diminish. Avoidance reduction is typically tested by using Extinction with Response Prevention (ExRP) protocols, where feared stimuli are presented without any aversive outcome while avoidance is prevented. These effects, however, often do not persist. Here, we tested whether pairing an avoidance response with the presence of an aversive event would reduce avoidance more than ExRP. Participants (N = 58) first saw a picture of a square (A) being paired with a shock whereas another picture of a square (B) not being paired with a shock. Then, they learned to press a button during the presentation of A to avoid the shock. Afterwards, the ExRP group saw unreinforced presentations of A and B without being able to press the avoidance button, whereas the Contingency Reversal group (ConR) received a shock whenever they pressed the button in presence of A. In the test phase, participants saw unreinforced presentations of A and B. Results showed that after successful acquisition of fear and avoidance, in the test phase the ConR group avoided A less often than did the ExRP group. Research on contingency reversal could prove helpful for developing avoidance reduction protocols. ispartof: Cognition & Emotion vol:34 issue:6 pages:1284-1290 ispartof: location:England status: published

Human fear conditioning is often seen as the result of a highly automatic process that is independent of higher cognitive functions and verbal instructions. However, cumulative research findings call this view into question. In the current preregistered study (N = 102), we investigated whether the number of participants who successfully show conditioned fear acquisition depends on the instructions given to them before the fear conditioning phase. Particularly, one third of the participants were instructed about the precise contingency between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US). Another third was merely instructed that there would be a contingency. The last third did not get any instructions about the CS-US contingency. We found facilitated fear acquisition rate in the first and second group compared to the third group. Furthermore, contingency reversal instructions following the acquisition phase reversed both conditioned skin conductance and startle responses. These results highlight that researchers should systematically report the instructions given to participants in human fear conditioning studies.

Defensive reactions need to be quick and appropriate to ensure survival. So, it is crucial that threats trigger immediate action upon detection, even in the absence of awareness. Also, the form of such action should be appropriate to the imminence of the threat. Thus, attention should be guided by signals of increasing threat imminence. We examined whether subliminally presented threat stimuli provoke automatic avoidance tendencies and whether threat cues’ distance change and threat potential determine attention allocation. Following fear conditioning, participants performed an approach-avoidance task with subliminally presented conditioned threat and safety stimuli and an attentional bias task with approaching versus distancing signals of threat and safety. Pre-attentive processing of threat cues resulted in approach rather than avoidance tendencies; attention was captured preferentially by signals of increasing threat imminence. The results support the importance of threat imminence and extend findings of previous research on pre-attentive influences on defensive responding. ispartof: Emotion vol:17 issue:2 pages:251-258 ispartof: location:United States status: published

BackgroundExtinction-based procedures are often used to inhibit maladaptive fear responses. However, because extinction procedures show efficacy limitations, transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been suggested as a promising add-on enhancer.ObjectiveIn this study, we tested how cathodal tDCS over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex affects extinction and tried to unveil the processes at play that boost the effectiveness of extinction procedures and its translational potential to the treatment of anxiety disorders.MethodsWe implemented a fear conditioning paradigm whereby 41 healthy women (mean age = 20.51 +/- 5.0) were assigned to either cathodal tDCS (n = 27) or sham tDCS (n = 16). Fear responses were measured with self-reports, autonomic responses, and implicit avoidance tendencies.ResultsCathodal tDCS shows no statistically significant effect in extinction, according to selfreports, and seems to even negatively affect fear conditioned skin conductance responses. However, one to three months after the tDCS session and extinction, we found a group difference in the action tendencies towards the neutral stimuli (F (1, 41) = 12.04, p =.001,.p2 =.227), with the cathodal tDCS group (as opposed to the sham group) showing a safety learning (a positive bias towards the CS-), with a moderate effect size. This suggests that cathodal tDCS may foster stimuli discrimination, leading to a decreased generalization effect.DiscussionCathodal tDCS may have enhanced long-term distinctiveness between threatening cues and perceptively similar neutral cues through a disambiguation process of the value of the neutral stimuli-a therapeutic target in anxiety disorders. Future studies should confirm these results and extend the study of cathodal tDCS effect on short term avoidance tendencies., AGA is supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal and Programa COMPETE [grants numbers SFRH/BD/80945/2011, PTDC/MHC-PAP/5618/2014 (POCI-01-0145FEDER-016836); http://www.poci-compete2020.pt/].JA is supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal and Programa COMPETE [grants numbers PTDC/MHC-PAP/5618/2014 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016836), PTDC/MHC-PCN/3575/2012, PTDC/MHC-PCN/0522/2014, PTDC/MHC-PCN/6805/2014; https://www.fct.pt/index.phtml.en].The Cognitive and Behavioral Center for Research and Intervention of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra is supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement [UID/PSI/01662/2013; https://www.portugal2020.pt].The Psychology Research Centre of the University of Minho is supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER007653). The Proaction Laboratory and the PTDC/MHC-PAP/5618/2014 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER016836) directly supported this research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Signaled active avoidance (SigAA) is the key experimental procedure for studying the acquisition of instrumental responses toward conditioned threat cues. Traditional analytic approaches (e.g., general linear model) often obfuscate important individual differences, although individual differences in learned responses characterize both animal and human learning data. However, individual differences models (e.g., latent growth curve modeling) typically require large samples and onerous computational methods. Here, we present an analytic methodology that enables the detection of individual differences in SigAA performance at a high accuracy, even when a single animal is included in the data set (i.e., n = 1 level). We further show an online software that enables the easy application of our method to any SigAA data set. ispartof: LEARNING & MEMORY vol:25 issue:11 pages:564-568 ispartof: location:United States status: published

Traditional theoretical models hold that avoidance reflects the interplay of Pavlovian and instrumental learning. Here we suggest that avoidance tendencies to intrinsically neutral cues may be established by mere Pavlovian association. Following fear conditioning, in which pictures of one object were paired with shock (CS+) whereas pictures of another object were not (CS−), CS+ pictures facilitated avoidance reactions and interfered with approach responses, relative to CS− pictures, in a symbolic approach/avoidance reaction time task. This was achieved without any instrumental relation between responses and CS continuation or unconditioned stimulus presentation. Moreover, those avoidance tendencies were sensitive to Pavlovian extinction (they were reduced after repeated presentations of the CS+ without shock) and renewal (recovery of conditioned responding upon returning to the initial conditioning context after extinction in a different context). The present results may help us understand the self-perpetuating nature of pathological fear and anxiety.

Fear conditioning is one of the prime paradigms of behavioural neuroscience and a source of tremendous insight in the fundamentals of learning and memory and the psychology and neurobiology of emotion. It is also widely regarded as a model for the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders in a diathesis-stress model of psychopathology. Starting from the apparent paradox between the adaptive nature of fear conditioning and the dysfunctional nature of pathological anxiety, we present a critique of the human fear conditioning paradigm as an experimental model for psychopathology. We discuss the potential benefits of expanding the human fear conditioning paradigm by (1) including action tendencies as an important index of fear and (2) paying more attention to “weak” (i.e., ambiguous) rather than “strong” fear learning situations (Lissek et al., 2006), such as contained in selective learning procedures. We present preliminary data that illustrate these ideas and discuss the importance of response systems divergence in understanding individual differences in vulnerability for the development of pathological anxiety.

With the discovery of the blocking effect, learning theory took a huge leap forward, because blocking provided a crucial clue that surprise is what drives learning. This in turn stimulated the development of novel association-formation theories of learning. Eventually, the ability to explain blocking became nothing short of a touchstone for the validity of any theory of learning, including propositional and other nonassociative theories. The abundance of publications reporting a blocking effect and the importance attributed to it suggest that it is a robust phenomenon. Yet, in the current article we report 15 failures to observe a blocking effect despite the use of procedures that are highly similar or identical to those used in published studies. Those failures raise doubts regarding the canonical nature of the blocking effect and call for a reevaluation of the central status of blocking in theories of learning. They may also illustrate how publication bias influences our perspective toward the robustness and reliability of seemingly established effects in the psychological literature. (PsycINFO Database Record

When people repeatedly practice the same cognitive task, their response times (RT) invariably decrease. Dutilh, Vandekerckhove, Tuerlinckx, and Wagenmakers (2009) argued that the traditional focus on how mean RT decreases with practice offers limited insight; their diffusion model analysis showed that the effect of practice is multifaceted, involving an increase in rate of information processing, a decrease in response caution, adjusted response bias, and, unexpectedly, a strong decrease in nondecision time. In this study, we aim to further disentangle these effects into stimulus-specific and task-related components. The data of a transfer experiment, in which repeatedly presented sets and new sets of stimuli were alternated, show that the practice effects on both speed of information processing and time needed for peripheral processing are partly task-related and partly stimulus-specific. The effects on response caution and response bias appear to be task-related. This diffusion model decomposition provides a perspective on practice that is more detailed and more informative than the traditional analysis of mean RT.

Complex fear learning procedures might be better suited than the common differential fear conditioning paradigm for detecting individual differences related to vulnerability for anxiety disorders. Two such procedures are the blocking procedure and the protection-from-overshadowing procedure. Their comparison allows for the examination of discriminatory fear learning under conditions of ambiguity. The present study examined the role of individual differences in such discriminatory fear learning. We hypothesized that heightened trait anxiety would be related to a deficit in discriminatory fear learning. Participants gave US-expectancy ratings as an index for the threat value of individual CSs following blocking and protection-from-overshadowing training. The difference in threat value at test between the protected-from-overshadowing CS and the blocked CS was negatively correlated with scores on a self-report tension-stress scale that approximates facets of generalized anxiety disorder (DASS-S), but not with other individual difference variables. In addition, a behavioral test showed that only participants scoring high on the DASS-S avoided the protected-from-overshadowing CS. This observed deficit in discriminatory fear learning for participants with high levels of tension-stress might be an underlying mechanism for fear overgeneralization in diffuse anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder. ispartof: Frontiers in Psychology vol:4 issue:MAY ispartof: location:Switzerland status: published

In a classic 1978 MemoryCognition article, Geoff Loftus explained why noncrossover interactions are removable. These removable interactions are tied to the scale of measurement for the dependent variable and therefore do not allow unambiguous conclusions about latent psychological processes. In the present article, we present concrete examples of how this insight helps prevent experimental psychologists from drawing incorrect conclusions about the effects of forgetting and aging. In addition, we extend the Loftus classification scheme for interactions to include those on the cusp between removable and nonremovable. Finally, we use various methods (i.e., a study of citation histories, a questionnaire for psychology students and faculty members, an analysis of statistical textbooks, and a review of articles published in the 2008 issue of Psychology and Aging) to show that experimental psychologists have remained generally unaware of the concept of removable interactions. We conclude that there is more to interactions in a 2 × 2 design than meets the eye.

When people repeatedly practice the same cognitive task, their response times (RT) invariably decrease. Dutilh, Vandekerckhove, Tuerlinckx, and Wagenmakers (2009) argued that the traditional focus on how mean RT decreases with practice offers limited insight; their diffusion model analysis showed that the effect of practice is multifaceted, involving an increase in rate of information processing, a decrease in response caution, adjusted response bias, and, unexpectedly, a strong decrease in nondecision time. In this study, we aim to further disentangle these effects into stimulus-specific and task-related components. The data of a transfer experiment, in which repeatedly presented sets and new sets of stimuli were alternated, show that the practice effects on both speed of information processing and time needed for peripheral processing are partly task-related and partly stimulus-specific. The effects on response caution and response bias appear to be task-related. This diffusion model decomposition provides a perspective on practice that is more detailed and more informative than the traditional analysis of mean RT.

Response inhibition is a hallmark of executive control and crucial to support flexible behaviour in a constantly changing environment. Recently, it has been shown that response inhibition is influenced by the presentation of emotional stimuli (Verbruggen and De Houwer, 2007). Healthy individuals typically differ in the degree to which they are able to regulate their emotional state, but it remains unknown whether individual differences in emotion regulation (ER) may alter the interplay between emotion and response inhibition. Here we address this issue by testing healthy volunteers who were equally divided in groups with high and low Heart Rate Variability (HRV) during rest, a physiological measure that serves as proxy of emotion regulation. Both groups performed an emotional stop-signal task, in which negative high arousing pictures served as negative emotional stimuli and neutral low arousing pictures served as neutral non-emotional stimuli. We found that individuals with high HRV activated and inhibited their responses faster compared to individuals with low HRV, but only in the presence of negative stimuli. No group differences emerged for the neutral stimuli. Thus, individuals with low HRV are more susceptible to the adverse effects of negative emotion on response initiation and inhibition. The present research corroborates the idea that the presentation of emotional stimuli may interfere with inhibition and it also adds to previous research by demonstrating that the aforementioned relationship varies for individuals differing in HRV. We suggest that focusing on individual differences in HRV and its associative ER may shed more light on the dynamic interplay between emotion and cognition.

The blocking effect has inspired numerous associative learning theories and is widely cited in the literature. We recently reported a series of 15 experiments that failed to obtain a blocking effect in rodents. On the basis of those consistent failures, we claimed that there is a lack of insight into the boundary conditions for blocking. In his commentary, Soto (2018) argued that contemporary associative learning theory does provide a specific boundary condition for the occurrence of blocking, namely the use of same- versus different-modality stimuli. Given that in 10 of our 15 experiments same-modality stimuli were used, he claims that our failure to observe a blocking effect is unsurprising. We disagree with that claim, because of theoretical, empirical, and statistical problems with his analysis. We also address 2 other possible reasons for a lack of blocking that are referred to in Soto's (2018) analysis, related to generalization and salience, and dissect the potential importance of both. Although Soto's (2018) analyses raise a number of interesting points, we see more merit in an empirically guided analysis and call for empirical testing of boundary conditions on blocking. (PsycINFO Database Record ispartof: JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL vol:147 issue:4 pages:603-610 ispartof: location:United States status: published