Poor Mnemonic Discrimination Predicts Overgeneralization of Fear
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Poor Mnemonic Discrimination Predicts Overgeneralization of Fear Emily E. Bernstein 1
&
Floor van der Does 2 & Scott P. Orr 3,4 & Richard J. McNally 1
Accepted: 19 October 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Anxiety disorders are characterized by difficulty distinguishing safe contexts from previous or imagined threats. Conditioned fears spread beyond what is reasonable or adaptive, leading to broad and interfering anxieties when people overgeneralize their fears. Difficulties with mnemonic discrimination, a component process of memory supporting the integration of old and new experiences, may foster overgeneralization and increase risk for anxiety disorders. Individuals along a spectrum of anxiety severity (n = 117) completed a differential fear conditioning paradigm and the computerized Mnemonic Similarity Task. The task measures mnemonic discrimination by requiring individuals to differentiate between highly similar old and new entities. We predicted that low mnemonic discrimination would be associated with overgeneralization, i.e., flatter slopes of change in response to stimuli increasingly dissimilar to the conditioned stimulus. Conditional growth models showed that as expected, participants with the highest mnemonic discrimination scores also exhibited the steepest declines in fear ratings as stimuli increasingly differed from the conditioned stimulus. Results were unchanged after adjusting for recognition memory, selfreported anxiety, and clinical diagnoses and symptoms. Results support the hypothesis that memory interference (i.e., low mnemonic discrimination) could increase vulnerability for overgeneralization. Findings justify additional exploration of mnemonic discrimination and its role in anxious psychopathology. Keywords Mnemonic discrimination . Pattern separation . Generalization . Fear learning . Anxiety
Introduction Classical fear conditioning has long figured in theories of anxiety disorders. From this perspective, a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) comes to elicit a fear response because it is associated with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US; for a review, see Mineka and Zinbarg 2006). A person might become anxious every time his or her face flushes because this sensation was paired with a panic attack or begin worrying excessively at work due to a past or feared failure. Conditioned fear is intrinsically adaptive as it allows people to recognize signs of real danger and avoid harm (Mattson 2014). However, individuals with anxiety disorders
* Emily E. Bernstein [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
2
Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, Netherlands
3
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
4
Present address: Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
chronically and erroneously predict danger in harmless or uncertain situations. People may feel anxious when their face flushes from exercising or when arriving at work despite having received
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