TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schiele, Miriam A.
A1  - Reinhard, Julia
A1  - Reif, Andreas
A1  - Domschke, Katharina
A1  - Romanos, Marcel
A1  - Deckert, Jürgen
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Developmental aspects of fear: Comparing the acquisition and generalization of conditioned fear in children and adults
JF  - Developmental Psychobiology
N2  - Most research on human fear conditioning and its generalization has focused on adults whereas only little is known about these processes in children. Direct comparisons between child and adult populations are needed to determine developmental risk markers of fear and anxiety. We compared 267 children and 285 adults in a differential fear conditioning paradigm and generalization test. Skin conductance responses (SCR) and ratings of valence and arousal were obtained to indicate fear learning. Both groups displayed robust and similar differential conditioning on subjective and physiological levels. However, children showed heightened fear generalization compared to adults as indexed by higher arousal ratings and SCR to the generalization stimuli. Results indicate overgeneralization of conditioned fear as a developmental correlate of fear learning. The developmental change from a shallow to a steeper generalization gradient is likely related to the maturation of brain structures that modulate efficient discrimination between danger and (ambiguous) safety cues.
KW  - fear conditioning
KW  - fear generalization
KW  - development
KW  - skin conductance
KW  - maturation
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-189488
VL  - 58
IS  - 4
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kuhn, Manuel
A1  - Scharfenort, Robert
A1  - Schümann, Dirk
A1  - Schiele, Miriam A.
A1  - Münsterkötter, Anna L.
A1  - Deckert, Jürgen
A1  - Domschke, Katharina
A1  - Haaker, Jan
A1  - Kalisch, Raffael
A1  - Pauli, Paul
A1  - Reif, Andreas
A1  - Romanos, Marcel
A1  - Zwanzger, Peter
A1  - Lonsdorf, Tina B.
T1  - Mismatch or allostatic load? Timing of life adversity differentially shapes gray matter volume and anxious temperament
JF  - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
N2  - Traditionally, adversity was defined as the accumulation of environmental events (allostatic load). Recently however, a mismatch between the early and the later (adult) environment (mismatch) has been hypothesized to be critical for disease development, a hypothesis that has not yet been tested explicitly in humans. We explored the impact of timing of life adversity (childhood and past year) on anxiety and depression levels (N = 833) and brain morphology (N = 129). Both remote (childhood) and proximal (recent) adversities were differentially mirrored in morphometric changes in areas critically involved in emotional processing (i.e. amygdala/hippocampus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, respectively). The effect of adversity on affect acted in an additive way with no evidence for interactions (mismatch). Structural equation modeling demonstrated a direct effect of adversity on morphometric estimates and anxiety/depression without evidence of brain morphology functioning as a mediator. Our results highlight that adversity manifests as pronounced changes in brain morphometric and affective temperament even though these seem to represent distinct mechanistic pathways. A major goal of future studies should be to define critical time periods for the impact of adversity and strategies for intervening to prevent or reverse the effects of adverse childhood life experiences.
KW  - VBM
KW  - childhood maltreatment
KW  - adversity
KW  - stressful life events
KW  - mismatch
KW  - allostatic load
Y1  - 2016
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-189645
VL  - 11
IS  - 4
ER  -