Abstract
Psychophysiological markers have been focused to investigate the psychopathology of psychiatric disorders and personality subtypes. In order to understand neurobiological mechanisms underlying these conditions, fear-conditioning model has been widely used. However, simple aversive stimuli are too simplistic to understand mechanisms because most patients with psychiatric disorders are affected by social stressors. The objective of this study was to test the feasibility of a newly-designed conditioning experiment using a stimulus to cause interpersonal conflicts and examine associations between personality traits and response to that stimulus. Twenty-nine healthy individuals underwent the fear conditioning and extinction experiments in response to three types of stimuli: a simple aversive sound, disgusting pictures, and pictures of an actors’ face with unpleasant verbal messages that were designed to cause interpersonal conflicts. Conditioned response was quantified by the skin conductance response (SCR). Correlations between the SCR changes, and personality traits measured by the Zanarini Rating Scale for Borderline Personality Disorder (ZAN-BPD) and Revised NEO Personality Inventory were explored. The interpersonal conflict stimulus resulted in successful conditioning, which was subsequently extinguished, in a similar manner as the other two stimuli. Moreover, a greater degree of conditioned response to the interpersonal conflict stimulus correlated with a higher ZAN-BPD total score. Fear conditioning and extinction can be successfully achieved, using interpersonal conflicts as a stimulus. Given that conditioned fear caused by the interpersonal conflicts is likely associated with borderline personality traits, this paradigm could contribute to further understanding of underlying mechanisms of interpersonal fear implicated in borderline personality disorder.
Highlights
Anxiety and fear are indispensable emotional states for survival that serve as an adaptive function in a changing environment
We aimed to explore the feasibility of using the interpersonal stimuli as social stresses in the fear conditioning paradigm by investigating the achievement of associative learning in healthy individuals
These results have confirmed the feasibility of our fear conditioning paradigm employing interpersonal conflicts as an aversive stimulus, which can be applied to future studies for psychiatric disorders implicated in interpersonal fear such as borderline personality disorder (BPD) and anxiety disorders
Summary
Anxiety and fear are indispensable emotional states for survival that serve as an adaptive function in a changing environment. These conditions are caused by a variety of stimuli, including physical stimuli and social contextual stimuli such as interpersonal conflicts [1]. Subtypes of anxiety disorders are primarily differentiated by the nature of CSs and USs in the fear conditioning model In this context, distressing events, panic attacks, and traumatic encounters are regarded as USs that provoke unconditioned anxiety in patients with SAD, panic disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), respectively, while corresponding CSs are people, places, and contexts [10].
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