Abstract
Introduction Spider phobia is a disease characterized by abnormal and automated fear reaction towards spiders [3]. Theories about the etiology of phobic fear suggest that the enhanced fear response in phobic patients results from a systematically biased interpretation of the danger associated with the feared stimulus [5]. Öhman's theory presumes that
Highlights
Spider phobia is a disease characterized by abnormal and automated fear reaction towards spiders [3]
We evaluated shape differences of the amygdala between patients diagnosed with spider phobia and healthy comparison subjects
The current study demonstrates decrements localized in regions in the vicinity of the basolateral and central nuclei in patients with spider phobia
Summary
Spider phobia is a disease characterized by abnormal and automated fear reaction towards spiders [3]. Öhman’s theory presumes that in healthy subjects, after encountering a phobia-relevant stimulus, an affective response is elicited through automatic and rapid evaluation of the stimulus, which initiates a sequence of controlled processing procedures. In phobic patients, these controlled mechanisms are suggested to be overridden by the automatic and exaggerated affective response [34]. Deregulation of emotional processes is one of the core clinical characteristics of spider phobia [16,23] and several neurobiological studies have suggested that the pathophysiology of spider phobia involves brain circuits sub-serving emotion regulation processes, encompassing fronto-limbic brain regions [24,42]. The amygdala has been suggested to play a role in a wide range of emotional processes which include: the perception and experience of emotional states, emotional learning and formation of emotional memories and emotion regulation [4,7,15,22,48,53,63]
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