Achievement motivation modulates Pavlovian aversive conditioning to goal-relevant stimuli

A Literature Review on Holistic Well-Being and Dopamine Fasting: An Integrated Approach

Popularly known as dopaminergic detox or dopamine fasting, it is a concept that aims at reducing dependence on instant satisfaction gratification and overstimulation to attain mental clarity, lessen anxiety, and be able to enjoy everyday events again. Digital detox has been a part of the dopamine fasting concept for several years now. However, some critics argue that this notion has no scientific proof behind it and may fail to deal with the problem of dopamine dysregulation. Some intense types of dopamine fasting which include extreme isolation or strict dieting can result in damage to mental health as well as physical fitness. The objective of the article is to understand what dopamine fasting means and see the literature and evidence available on the topic. Indexes like PubMed, Scopus, OVID, Embase, and Google Scholar were searched using the keywords to understand the existing knowledge about dopamine fasting. The literature review was then written to incorporate the understanding in a way that can be implemented practically. Recent studies have shown that individuals who engage in dopamine-fasting-like ideologies may experience reduced impulsive behaviors, increased focus on tasks, and reduced overwhelm. However, extreme forms of dopamine fasting can lead to feelings of loneliness, anxiety, and malnutrition, which can have detrimental effects on mental and physical health. Hence, the effects of dopamine fasting can vary greatly among individuals, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It is essential to consider individual needs and preferences when incorporating dopamine fasting into one's lifestyle and explore alternative practices that align with the principles of dopamine fasting. Understanding and respecting these differences is crucial in determining the most suitable strategies for maintaining a balanced dopamine response and overall psychological health. The benefits of dopamine fasting can be tremendous if done correctly but it depends on every individual to find the correct way and in the modern day, the practices can become tough to implement.

Far from the threatening crowd: Generalisation of conditioned threat expectancy and fear in COVID-19 lockdown

Fear and anxiety are rarely confined to specific stimuli or situations. In fear generalisation, there is a spread of fear responses elicited by physically dissimilar generalisation stimuli (GS) along a continuum between danger and safety. The current study investigated fear generalisation with a novel online task using COVID-19-relevant stimuli (i.e., busy or quiet shopping street/mall scenes) during pandemic lockdown restrictions in the United Kingdom. Participants (N = 50) first completed clinically relevant trait measures before commencing a habituation phase, where two conditioned stimuli (CSs; i.e., a busy or quiet high street/mall scene) were presented. Participants then underwent fear conditioning where one conditioned stimulus (CS+) was followed by an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US; a loud female scream accompanied by a facial photograph of a female displaying a fearful emotion) and another (CS-) was not. In a test phase, six generalisation stimuli were presented where the US was withheld, and participants provided threat expectancy and fear ratings for all stimuli. Following successful conditioning, fear generalization was observed for both threat expectancy and fear ratings. Trait worry partially predicted generalised threat expectancy and COVID-19 fear strongly predicted generalised fear. In conclusion, a generalisation gradient was evident using an online remote generalisation task with images of busy/quiet streets during the pandemic. Worry and fear of COVID-19 predicted fear generalisation.

Spontaneous instrumental avoidance learning in social contexts

Adaptation to our social environment requires learning how to avoid potentially harmful situations, such as encounters with aggressive individuals. Threatening facial expressions can evoke automatic stimulus-driven reactions, but whether their aversive motivational value suffices to drive instrumental active avoidance remains unclear. When asked to freely choose between different action alternatives, participants spontaneously-without instruction or monetary reward-developed a preference for choices that maximized the probability of avoiding angry individuals (sitting away from them in a waiting room). Most participants showed clear behavioral signs of instrumental learning, even in the absence of an explicit avoidance strategy. Inter-individual variability in learning depended on participants' subjective evaluations and sensitivity to threat approach feedback. Counterfactual learning best accounted for avoidance behaviors, especially in participants who developed an explicit avoidance strategy. Our results demonstrate that implicit defensive behaviors in social contexts are likely the product of several learning processes, including instrumental learning.

Infection, Learning, and Memory: Focus on Immune Activation and Aversive Conditioning

Here we review the effects of immune activation primarily via lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a cell wall component of Gram-negative bacteria, on hippocampal and non-hippocampal-dependent learning and memory. Rodent studies have found that LPS alters both the acquisition and consolidation of aversive learning and memory, such as those evoking evolutionarily adaptive responses like fear and disgust. The inhibitory effects of LPS on the acquisition and consolidation of contextual fear memory are discussed. LPS-induced alterations in the acquisition of taste and place-related conditioned disgust memory within bottle preference tasks and taste reactivity tests (taste-related), in addition to conditioned context avoidance tasks and the anticipatory nausea paradigm (place-related), are highlighted. Further, conditioned disgust memory consolidation may also be influenced by LPS-induced effects. Growing evidence suggests a central role of immune activation, especially pro-inflammatory cytokine activity, in eliciting the effects described here. Understanding how infection-induced immune activation alters learning and memory is increasingly important as bacterial and viral infections are found to present a risk of learning and memory impairment.

Angry and fearful compared to happy or neutral faces as conditional stimuli in human fear conditioning: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Some previous research has shown stronger acquisition and impaired extinction of fear conditioned to angry or fearful compared to happy or neutral face conditional stimuli (CS) - a difference attributed to biological 'preparedness'. A systematic review and meta-analysis of fear conditioning studies comparing face CSs of differing expressions identified thirty studies, eighteen of which were eligible for meta-analysis. Skin conductance responses were larger to angry or fearful faces compared to happy or neutral faces during habituation, acquisition and extinction. Significant differences in differential conditioning between angry, fearful, neutral, and happy face CSs were also found, but differences were more prominent between angry and neutral faces compared to angry/fearful and happy faces. This is likely due to lower arousal elicited by neutral compared to happy faces, which may be more salient as CSs. The findings suggest there are small to moderate differences in differential conditioning when angry or fearful compared to happy or neutral faces are used as CSs. These findings have implications for fear conditioning study design and the preparedness theory.

Is knowledge emotion? The subjective emotional responses to wines depend on level of self-reported expertise and sensitivity to key information about the wine

Many factors influence emotional responses evoked by wines. Here we assessed how self-reported wine expertise, tasting condition (blind vs. informed) as well as sensitivity to key information about wines (e.g., reputation, price, grape variety) impact the subjective affective responses they evoked. We measured subjective affective responses of high and low in self-reported wine expertise consumers to 8 different wines in a blind tasting and in a tasting when information about the wines was known. After their first tasting session, we asked participants the extent to which they considered specific information when they intended to purchase wine (e.g., reputation, etc.). The more wine consumers high in self-reported expertise paid attention to the wine's reputation, the less they used feelings when tasting wines. In contrast, the more the wine tasters low in self-reported expertise paid attention to the wine's reputation, the more feelings they reported. Moreover, when considering positive and negative feelings separately, it appears that the more participants paid attention to the label, the lower the number of positive terms they tended to mention. Additionally, wine tasters low in self-reported expertise were more inclined to report positive feelings towards the wines in the informed condition and if they were sensitive to wine's reputation. In contrast, wine tasters high in self-reported expertise were less inclined to report positive feelings towards the wines in the informed condition and if they were sensitive to wine's reputation. These results hint at the importance of considering psychological theories of emotion while studying wine-elicited emotions, in particular appraisal theories of emotion.

Generalization of conditioned fear along a dimension of increasing positive valence

The amount of fear evoked by potential threats is oftentimes proportional to the overlap in shared features with known threats. An adaptive learning system should therefore extract relevant features from threat stimuli to successfully detect other novel threats in the environment. But what if the most relevant feature of a threat stimulus is emotionally positive? Here, we used Pavlovian fear conditioning to ask whether people extract positive emotional features of a fear conditioned stimulus (CS) to selectively generalize to other stimuli that contain positive features. In a between subjects design, we first paired a picture of a face expressing either a slight amount of happiness or fear with an electrical shock to the wrist. We then tested fear generalization to modified face stimuli of the same identity expressing more or less happiness or fear. Both groups exhibited biased physiological arousal (a peak shift) to a face stimulus with the most exaggerated emotional expression, regardless of valence. Fear generalization diminished to unreinforced happy faces over the course of testing, whereas arousal was maintained to unreinforced fearful faces throughout testing. Finally, subjects fear conditioned to a slightly happy face were accurate at retrospectively identifying the correct CS, whereas subjects fear conditioned to a fearful face retrospectively misidentified a more fearful face as the threat CS. These findings suggest that positive emotional features extracted from a known threat can guide biased fear generalization, but that generalization is maintained by a dimension of increasing fear which also produces retrospective biases in threat intensity estimation.