Extinguishing fear and defensive responses to environmental threats when they are no longer warranted is a critical learning ability that can promote healthy self-regulation and, ultimately, reduce susceptibility to or maintenance of affective-, trauma-, stressor-,and anxiety-related disorders. Neuroimaging tools provide an important means to uncover the neural mechanisms of effective extinction learning that, in turn, can abate the return of fear. Here I review the promises and pitfalls of functional neuroimaging as a method to investigate fear extinction circuitry in the healthy human brain. I discuss the extent to which neuroimaging has validated the core circuits implicated in rodent models and has expanded the scope of the brain regions implicated in extinction processes. Finally, I present new advances made possible by multivariate data analysis tools that yield more refined insights into the brain–behavior relationships involved.
CITATION STYLE
LaBar, K. S. (2023). Neuroimaging of Fear Extinction. In Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences (Vol. 64, pp. 79–101). Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH. https://doi.org/10.1007/7854_2023_429
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