New research by Dr. Bryan Roche and colleagues identifies pathways to the acquisition of fears

Saturday, December 1, 2012 - 00:00

Although excessive avoidance of feared things and events lies at the heart of many forms of psychopathology, very little is known about the different psychological processes by which it may be acquired. Indeed, surprisingly little research has been conducted on the common observation that one need not directly experience something unpleasant in order to subsequently show avoidance of it. New research by Dr Bryan Roche and colleagues in the UK, USA and Belgium, has revealed for the first time that avoidance acquired indirectly via verbal instructions and cognitive inferences result in similar levels of behaviour and threat-beliefs to avoidance acquired after direct learning.  This research has now been published in the leading open access journal, PLoS ONE: Dymond, S., Schlund, M. W., Roche, B., De Houwer, J., & Freegard, G. (2012). Safe from harm: Learned, instructed, and symbolic generalization pathways of human threat-avoidance. PLoS ONE, http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047539.

Read the full press release here.