RETURN OF FEAR IN RATS DUE TO CONTEXT CHANGE, DELAY OF TESTING, AND THEIR COMBINATION.

Abstract

Conditioned and then extinguished fear recurs if the background context is changed after extinction (renewal effect) or if there is a temporal interval between extinction and testing (spontaneous recovery effect). The present study demonstrated summation of these effects in rats, and thus supports the claim that the spontaneous recovery effect is a special case of the renewal effect in that temporal contexts are changed after extinction. The demonstration of summation of renewal and spontaneous recovery effects has clinical implications for the return of fear (i.e., relapse) after exposure therapy for phobias, because the rats’ fear conditioning has been considered to be a good animal model for understanding the neural and behavioral processes in human phobias.