Fear Conditioning
Extinction is typically studied within the Pavlovian fear conditioning framework in which extinction refers to the reduction in a conditioned response (CR; e.g., fear response/freezing) when a conditioned stimulus (CS; e.g., neutral stimulus/light or tone) is repeatedly presented in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus (US; e.g., foot shock/loud noise) with which it has been previously paired.
The simplest explanation of extinction is that as the CS is presented without the aversive US, the animal gradually "unlearns" the CS–US association which is known as the associative loss theory. However, this explanation is complicated by observations where there is some fear restoration, such as reinstatement (restoration of CR in the context where extinction training occurred but not a different context after aversive US is presented again), renewal (restoration of CR in context A but not in B when learning occurred in context A and extinction in context B), and spontaneous recovery (restoration of CR when the retention test occurs after a long but not a short delay after extinction training) and alternative explanations have been offered.
Research on fear extinct indeeded in animal models (typically rats) has clinical implications such as exposure-based therapies for the treatment of phobias and anxiety conditions.
Read more about this topic: Extinction (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the words fear and/or conditioning:
“Our fear that Communism might some day take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has.”
—Anonymous U.S. Analyst In 1967. Quoted in “The Uses of Anticommunism,” vol. 21, published in The Socialist Register (1985)
“The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)