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Abstract
Since the seminal ‘Little Albert’ study by Watson and Rayner (1920), fear conditioning has become one of the most commonly used paradigms for studying the etiology of anxiety-related disorders. In a fear conditioning procedure, a (neutral) conditioned stimulus (CS) is paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), resulting in fear-related conditioned responses (CRs) to the CS. Whereas fear conditioning research initially focused on observable elements in the environment (i.e., CSs, USs, and their contingency) and their effects (i.e., CRs), subsequent research indicated that attention should also be given to unobservable mental events (e.g., intrusive memories of aversive outcomes) to more fully account for the symptomatology of anxiety disorders. In this paper, we review the research relating to four major research questions on the relationship between mental imagery and fear conditioning: (1) Can mental imagery substitute for actual stimulus administration? (2) Can mental imagery inflate CRs? (3) Can fear conditioning result in the installment of mental images as CRs (i.e., intrusions)? (4) Can mental imagery-based interventions reduce CRs? For all these research questions, tentative confirmatory evidence has been found and these findings corroborate contemporary conditioning theories. Nonetheless, we point to several open questions and methodological issues that require further research.
Highlights
Since the publication of Watson and Rayner's seminal ‘Little Albert’ study (Watson & Rayner, 1920), fear conditioning has become one of the most widely used paradigms to study the acquisition, extinction, and return of fear (Mineka & Zinbarg, 2006; Vervliet, Craske, & Hermans, 2013)
To illustrate the clustering of these research questions, we created a graphical network of the cross-referencing of the included articles and 4 central theoretical papers relating to each of the research questions. This graph shows distinct clusters relating to the different research questions, with a central position for research on mental-imagery based interventions to reduce conditioned fear
4 Note though that some of these studies we describe were motivated by the fear incubation theory rather than focused on investigating whether mental imagery can substitute for physical stimulus presentation
Summary
Since the publication of Watson and Rayner's seminal ‘Little Albert’ study (Watson & Rayner, 1920), fear conditioning has become one of the most widely used paradigms to study the acquisition, extinction, and return of fear (Mineka & Zinbarg, 2006; Vervliet, Craske, & Hermans, 2013). In recent years, research on mental imagery and how it is involved in psychopathology has been steadily expanding (for reviews see Holmes & Mathews, 2010; Ji, Heyes, MacLeod, & Holmes, 2016), and it has shown that therapeutic interventions that make use of mental imagery are promising for the treatment of anxiety-related disorders (Engelhard, McNally, & van Schie, 2019; Morina, Lancee, & Arntz, 2017) Translation of these insights to conditioning procedures could help to better understand the underlying mechanisms of such interventions
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