Becoming anxious: how threat conditioning affects negative valenced, positive valenced and cognitive systems.

PICCO SOLEDAD; RODRIGO FERNANDEZ*; MESSORE FERNANDO; MARÍA E PEDREIRA

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XXXII Congreso SAN; 2017

SAN

Classical conditioning is the process by which the representation of two stimulus become associated and then, one of them (CS) is capable of predicting the occurrence of the other (US).Neurobiological basis of anxiety disorders were studied in laboratory settings using threat conditioning (TC). Although, little is known about how the formation of a fear memory affects other cognitive and behavioral systems associated with these type of mental disorders. Anxiety manifest as a persistent and generalized defensive system, activated when predicted aversive events are perceived as a threat and uncertain. Moreover, this response involves a disrupted value calculation (threat overestimation) and attentional hypervigilance for potential threats. Here we aim to study how an aversive implicit memory (TC) in humans could affect other valenced and cognitive systems such as those mentioned. To reach such goal, we used different anxiety inventories (BAI and STAI) to discard potential symptoms, electrodermal activity as our implicit memory measure, after that conditioning groups were evaluated on negative valence, positive valence systems and cognitive systems using several different tasks. In Experiment 1 we compared trained and untrained groups which underwent TC followed by the valenced and cognitive tasks in the same day. In Experiment 2, we used the same design evaluating the different cognitive systems 48 hs later. We revealed that the formation of a fear memory affects some cognitive and behavioral systems which are involved in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders.