Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： For nearly half a century, the memory reconsolidation theory, which believes that even memories that have been consolidated would be reactivated during the retrieval process and temporarily return to an unstable state, has been continuously developed. Based on this understanding, the researchers proposed the retrieval-extinction paradigm. That is, after successfully learning the pairing rule between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US), the original memory was un-stabilized by presenting a single CS, and then traditional extinction training was performed. This paradigm has been proven in some studies to weaken the expression of non-adaptive fear memory effectively. However, other studies have reached different results, indicating that this paradigm failed to suppress the fear recovery. Current research mainly focused on the boundary conditions of memory conditions and retrieval conditions to explain the difference between studies, such as prediction error, acquisition time, the intensity of acquisition, and individual differences. Gender difference, as an essential variable of individual differences, is an influential factor in the study of boundary conditions. In the standard extinction paradigm, research has concluded that women easily acquire fear memory but that such fear memory is more difficult to extinct than that in men. However, it is relatively rare to explore gender differences in the research of the retrieval-extinction paradigm. Therefore, this study considered gender as a variable, using geometric figures as CS, wrist electric shock as the US, and skin conductance response as an indicator of fear response, to explore whether there is a gender difference in the fear extinction effect. The results showed no gender difference in the spontaneous fear recovery of the retrieval-extinction paradigm because all subjects successfully suppressed the spontaneous fear recovery. Nevertheless, there was a significant gender difference in the reinstatement test, in which men showed increased skin conductance responses (SCR), whereas women did not show any increased SCR. Besides, there were gender differences in the spontaneous fear recovery and reinstatement test of the standard extinction paradigm. After training by this paradigm, women showed increased SCR in spontaneously fear recovery and a tendency to fear generalization. In contrast, men showed suppressed spontaneous fear recovery but showed increased SCR in the reinstatement test. Our study proved a gender difference in the extinction effect of the retrieval-extinction paradigm (women showed the best extinction effect) and verified that the extinction effect of the retrieval-extinction paradigm was better than that of the standard extinction paradigm. From the results, we could demonstrate that the retrieval-extinction paradigm is an effective intervention method, especially for women. It will be beneficial to further verify evidence about the effectiveness of the retrieval-extinction paradigm and clarify its object and scope in clinical applications. Our study suggests that the retrieval-extinction paradigm in clinical transformation needs to provide more personalized treatment plans for male and female patients, thus improving clinical applicability and treatment effectiveness.
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