Fear Extinction as a Psychologist Views It

Fear extinction is a topic of central importance in translational neuroscience. It integrates knowledge from various disciplines, including clinical psychology, experimental psychology, psychiatry, cellular and systems neuroscience, and pharmacology. The experimental phenomenon of extinction was first discovered by Ivan P. Pavlov more than 100 years ago and still forms the basis for investigating the psychological and physiological mechanisms that drive extinction of fear. Here, I present old and new ways to think about fear conditioning and extinction from a psychologist's point of view. Extinction is a simple phenomenon with a complex machinery. Enhancing the behavioral analysis of extinction is necessary to advance research in neighboring disciplines as well and to increase our chances to develop extinction enhancers that might further improve efficacy of extinction-based therapies to treat dysfunctional fears. For that purpose, I address a number of fundamental questions in this chapter to clarify psychological viewpoints on the process of fear extinction. What is extinction? What is an association? What is fear? What can we learn from fear extinction? My goal is to reinforce critical thinking about basic assumptions underlying fear extinction and to open up new avenues for further research.

The evolution of the narcolepsy concept in Russia: A historical view

Following the first descriptions of narcolepsy with cataplexy by Westphal, Gelineau, and Fischer (1878-1880), Russian authors started to report on "narcolepsy cases" in 1894. It was, however, only in 1925 that Mankovsky reported a (postencephalitic) case, satisfying current diagnostic criteria for the disease. In the following 66 years (the last publication appeared in 1991), Russian authors including Davidenkov, Vein, and Yakhno made interesting contributions on the clinical features, neurophysiological correlates (e.g., sleep states and boundary dyscontrol), pathogenesis (e.g., hypothalamic origin), etiology (e.g., infectious, postvaccinal triggers, focal encephalitis), and treatment (e.g., use of sodium oxybate) of narcolepsy. Until recently, Pavlov's theory of narcolepsy as a "cortical excitatory-inhibitory phenomenon" strongly influenced the Russian view on the disease, contrasting with the current neurobiological insights acknowledged internationally. A Narcolepsy Network, including currently 10 member centers, was recently founded to promote knowledge, awareness, management, and research on this still poorly known disease in Russia.

[Ivan Pavlov (1849-1935): His life and conditional reflexes story revisited]

Historiography of IP Pavlov and his description of conditional reflexes has been thoroughly specified by the records collected between 1990-2000 by DP Todes, an American science historian specializing in Russia. The Pavlov's intent was to study the nervous processes underlying psychical activity by the conditional reflexes, not the conditioning theory. In his modeling of the higher nervous activity, he highlighted the dynamic and greatly plastic character of brain functioning as well as the functional character of some long-term behavioral disorders in dogs. Far from the Soviet dogmatic presentation of the "Pavlovian doctrine", the complexity of the Pavlov's thought also paved the way to innovative conceptions in opposition with his former modeling developed by Soviet physiologists such as NA Bernstein and PK Anokhin, and psychologists such as LS Vygotski and AR Luria.

The Introduction of Pavlovian Theory and the Change of the Medical System in China in the 1950s: Focusing on the Construction of the Protective Medical System

In the 1930s, Stalin established Pavlovian theory as a socialist medical theory, criticized bourgeois science and ideology, and consolidated his dictatorship. Stalin used Pavlov's theory to emphasize the interaction between man and environment and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, trying to ensure the legitimacy of the socialist system reform in politics and society. Therefore, if the Soviet scientists and doctors did not conform to Pavlov's theory, their research would be strictly controlled, making free and creative research impossible. In the 1950s, China and North Korea, which accepted the socialist political model of the Soviet Union, also had this dogmatic tendency. In 1950, China signed the "The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship," initiated the movement of learning from the Soviet Union in politics, economy, society, education, law, science, medical care, and other aspects, and established a socialist country based on the Soviet model. In Chinese medical circles, through the "Pavlov Learning Movement," they accepted the health care system and medical technology of the Soviet Union without any criticism, and carried out the ideological transformation of intellectuals to wipe out the influence of western capitalism. Moreover, Virchow's 'Cellular Pathology' and Mendel's 'Genetics' were denounced as reactionary bourgeoisie theory, and Pavlov's theory became a socialist medical theory based on dialectical materialism. As a result, the Communist Party of China reorganized the medical and scientific knowledge system based on Pavlov's theory, and took it as an important ideological tool to establish the socialist medical system. In the 1950s, Chinese medical workers strengthened ideological education through the "Pavlov's learning movement," applied this theory to clinical practice, and implemented new treatment methods such as "Sleep Therapy" and "PPM(Psychoprophylactic Painless childbirth Method)." In addition, hospitals implemented the "Protective Medical System" and established the socialist medical system. The goal of the protective medical system was to eliminate the negative stimulation which has adverse effects on the treatment of patients and to establish a patient-centered medical system. Therefore, the hospital launched a comprehensive effort to create a clean environment, eliminate all kinds of noise, cultivate a friendly working attitude, and improve nutrition. As a result, the hospital environment and the working attitude of medical staff improved and the treatment rate of diseases also improved, while the mortality rate of patients decreased. At the same time, with the strengthening of political education for doctors, nurses and patients in hospitals, hospitals have become places to educate socialist laws and ideology. In addition, in order to prove the superiority of Pavlov's theory, medical workers carried out unscientific sleep therapy on patients, so people's body became an experimental space for of socialism. Moreover, in the implementation of PPM, women could not tell the pain of childbirth, but under medical control, they were in a contradictory situation of enduring labor pain. The Communist Party of China has established its national identity by promoting its image of "rescuer", which liberates the patients from the pain of disease, and the "welfare" image of taking good care of the people's body. The Communist Party of China has reconstructed the metaphors of "sickness" and "labor pain", making it an indispensable medium for the concepts of socialism, women's Liberation and medical welfare to be engraved on the people's body. Therefore, through the clinical practice of sleep therapy and PPM, we can understand how the Communist Party of China controlled the people's body, and such policies and systems demonstrate the "medical" governance mode of socialist control over the people.

Neurasthenia, psy sciences and the 'great leap forward' in Maoist China

The present study looks into the much-neglected history of neurasthenia in Maoist China in relation to the development of psy sciences. It begins with an examination of the various factors that transformed neurasthenia into a major health issue from the late 1950s to mid-1960s. It then investigates a distinctive culture of therapeutic experiment of neurasthenia during this period, with emphasis on the ways in which psy scientists and medical practitioners manoeuvred in a highly politicized environment. The study concludes with a discussion of the legacy of these neurasthenia studies - in particular, the experiment with the famous 'speedy and synthetic therapy' - and of the implications the present study may have for future historical study of psychiatry and science.

Lamarckism by Other Means: Interpreting Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes in Twentieth-Century Britain

This essay examines the reception of Ivan Pavlov's work on conditioned reflexes in early to mid-twentieth century Britain. Recent work on the political interpretation of biology has shown that the nineteenth-century strategy of "making socialists" was undermined by August Weismann's attacks on the inheritance of acquired characters. I argue that Pavlov's research reinvigorated socialist hopes of transforming society and the people in it. I highlight the work of Pavlov's interpreters, notably the scientific journalist J. G. Crowther, the biologist Lancelot Hogben, and the science writer H. G. Wells, who made Pavlov's work accessible to a British audience and embraced the socialist implications of his research - especially the idea that people could be persuaded to become socialists through science writing for a nonspecialist audience and through use of a simplified language such as Basic English. They saw, in the followers of National Socialism, how Pavlovian conditioning could create a national movement, and believed that this could be used for their own more democratic form of socialism. In the final part of the essay, I suggest that this broad socio-cultural movement to reshape humanity proved controversial, especially in the post-war period and in light of Soviet use of brainwashing. The likes of Aldous Huxley and F. A. Hayek feared that conditioning could only lead to totalitarianism, while the historian E. P. Thompson put forward a socialist humanism that left room for human agency.

Working across species down on the farm: Howard S. Liddell and the development of comparative psychopathology, c. 1923-1962

Seeking a scientific basis for understanding and treating mental illness, and inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, American physiologists, psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1920s turned to nonhuman animals. This paper examines how new constructs such as "experimental neurosis" emerged as tools to enable psychiatric comparison across species. From 1923 to 1962, the Cornell "Behavior Farm" was a leading interdisciplinary research center pioneering novel techniques to experimentally study nonhuman psychopathology. Led by the psychobiologist Howard Liddell, work at the Behavior Farm formed part of an ambitious program to develop new preventative and therapeutic techniques and bring psychiatry into closer relations with physiology and medicine. At the heart of Liddell's activities were a range of nonhuman animals, including pigs, sheep, goats and dogs, each serving as a proxy for human patients. We examine how Pavlov's conceptualization of 'experimental neurosis' was used by Liddell to facilitate comparison across species and communication between researchers and clinicians. Our close reading of his experimental system demonstrates how unexpected animal behaviors and emotions were transformed into experimental virtues. However, to successfully translate such behaviors from the animal laboratory into the field of human psychopathology, Liddell increasingly reached beyond, and, in effect, redefined, the Pavlovian method to make it compatible and compliant with an ethological approach to the animal laboratory. We show how the resultant Behavior Farm served as a productive "hybrid" place, containing elements of experiment and observation, laboratory and field. It was through the building of close and more naturalistic relationships with animals over extended periods of time, both normal and pathological, and within and outside of the experimental space, that Liddell could understand, manage, and make useful the myriad behavioral complexities that emerged from the life histories of experimental animals, the researchers who worked with them, and their shared relationships to the wider physical and social environments.

"[G]azing into the synaptic chasm": the Brain in Beckett's Writing

This paper argues that Samuel Beckett's interest in functions of the brain is not only evidenced in his notebooks, taken from a number of psychology and psycho-physiognomy texts in the early 1930s, but is also explored and expanded in his fiction and drama. This paper investigates Beckett's fascination with the limits of "cerebral consciousness" and the brain's failure to consciously perceive certain bodily modifications especially when processing emotion. Like Antonio Damasio's definition of emotion as essentially the bodily modifications that include chemical changes, Beckett often exploits the idea of emotion as sorely a bodily phenomenon by creating characters who are unable to consciously perceive and process their emotion. For example, when talking about his own weeping, the narrator of The Unnamable attributes the tears to the malfunctioning of the brain, "liquefied brain", denying, displacing or making physical the feeling of sadness. By examining the ways in which Beckett emphasizes a somatic dimension of emotion and its relation to the brain function and perception in his writing, this paper reveals how he explores the idea of the self and extends the idea to what he calls the "impenetrable self" that cannot be consciously recognized. I argue that if, for Joseph LeDoux, the "notion of synapses as points of communication between cells is […] essential to our efforts to understand who we are in terms of brain mechanisms", for Beckett to expose such unconscious biological mechanisms and "gaps" becomes his own artistic challenge.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Ivan Petrovic Pavlov: their parallel scientific lives, schools and nobel prizes

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was not only a great scientist but he was also a dedicated teacher who managed to create his own School in Spain. Cajal was active at the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century, a period in which Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, another great contemporary scientist, also established a strong School in Russia. While these two acclaimed scientists shared a similar vision on science, a view they also conveyed to their disciples, they applied quite distinct criteria in the way they dealt with their followers. Interestingly, despite the geographic and idiomatic barriers that had to be overcome, the paths of these two great figures of XX century science crossed at least three times. First when they competed for the City of Moscow Prize, second when they both attended the "Congreso Internacional de Medicina de Madrid" (Medicine International Congress in Madrid) in 1903 and finally, they competed on four consecutive occasions for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Here we discuss their scientific vision, their different attitudes in the interaction with disciples and the distinct circumstances in which their paths crossed.