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Publication

How fasting and relief shape avoidance

Book - Dissertation

Over the past decades, the science of fear has shown spectacular progress with the development of behavioral and neurological tools that provide almost complete control over fear in the rodent and human laboratory. The hope was that these pre-clinical insights would significantly improve the treatment of clinical anxiety, but substantial change stays away. Clinical psychologists have argued that the propensity to avoid all things feared is more disabling than the fear itself. While avoidance is initially motivated by fear, we propose that it is further reinforced by the positive feeling of relief when the feared event is successfully omitted. The ambition of this project is to complement the study of fear with a study of relief to open the gridlock of avoidance and forge a closer link with clinical anxiety and its treatment. Relief is an understudied emotion; its characteristics and underlying mechanism remain unclear. In this project, we combined experimental, computational and neural approaches to examine and ultimately show that relief is a positive signal of surprise that shares similarities with the processing of rewards. We then investigate and found that higher levels of relief reinforce avoidance despite a decrease in fear levels. Furthermore, we investigated the effects of a dietary manipulation with strong effects on reward processes, overnight fasting, on avoidance. We found that acute hunger decreases relief from threat omission, which mediates a reduction in avoidance. With a note of caution about the still unknown effects of chronic hunger on relief and avoidance behaviors, our results support the hypothesis that relief plays a crucial reinforcing role in the tendency to avoid. The results of this project increase our understanding of the mechanisms of adaptive and maladaptive avoidance, and provide a proof-of-principe for new intervention strategies to target avoidance.
Publication year:2022
Accessibility:Open