Individual Differences in Vulnerability Factors for Anxiety Disorders: A Study on the Acquisition, Extinction, and Renewal of Avoidance, and the Concomitant Dynamics of Relief

We conducted an experiment to assess the role of trait anxiety (TA) and prospective intolerance of uncertainty (P-IU) in the extinction and renewal of avoidance and distress. In this experiment, we used an extinction procedure in which making the avoidance response did not prevent participants from noticing that the US did not follow warning stimuli. Renewal was assessed through a re-extinction phase conducted in a context different from that used in the acquisition and extinction phases. Our dependent measures included participants’ scores on P-IU and TA, the frequency of avoidance responses per trial, and participants’ post-trial relief ratings (used to infer the degree of distress suffered during the previous trial). We found that higher P-IU scores were associated with heightened relief ratings to a safety signal that had never been followed by the US in the avoidance acquisition phase, and with an overall less steep reduction in relief ratings during the re-extinction phase. Increased TA was associated with heightened avoidance frequency in safety-signal trials during the avoidance acquisition phase, along with a less steep overall reduction in frequency of avoidance responses and slower extinction in the extinction phase. Our results were inconclusive regarding individual differences in the renewal effect. In general, our results provide evidence for the role of individual differences in vulnerability factors for pathological anxiety in the acquisition and extinction of avoidance and relief.