Re. Hamm, A.O., Weike, A.I., 2005. The neuropsychology of fear-learning and fear regulation. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 57, 5-14

摘要

This letter is a comment on Hamm and Weike's recent review of the neuropsychology of fear learning and fear regulation in humans, IJoP (2005). Given the importance of the topic, this review is likely to be of interest to basic and clinical researchers alike. However, in their attempt to cover a wide literature, the authors have limited their review in a number of areas which opens at least one of their conclusions to debate.The paper provides a brief summary of the current knowledge of the neurobiology of fear learning and fear regulation in rodents. This is followed by a review of the authors' most recent work on human fear learning in well participants and patients with diverse brain lesions either as a result of stroke or of surgery. Particular emphasis is placed on the fear potentiated startle paradigm, a procedure for the assessment of fear learning that can be used in human and non-human animals. The authors propose that startle potentiationis 'a rather specific measure for fear acquisition' and that the acquisition of fear potentiated startle can occur in absence of cortical processing of the conditional stimuli and in absence of knowledge about the contingencies between conditional and unconditional stimuli. The latter does not hold for electrodermal conditioning, which is seen only if participants are aware of the stimulus contingencies and is said to reflect contingency learning. These data are interpreted to support a two level account of human fear learning, distinguishing between a subcortical level that is sufficient to promote fear learning as indexed by potentiated startle and a cortical level that is required for contingency learning as indexed by electrodermal responses.