Anxiety and threat generalisation with FLARe

The role that anxiety plays in processes and patterns of threat generalisation provides important insight into the development and maintenance of clinical anxiety. Previous studies using differential fear conditioning paradigms have found that people with high intolerance of uncertainty (IU) often show increased fear generalisation to stimuli that do not pose an imminent threat. This can complicate treatment as the client has more target fears. Little is known on the relationship between generalisation and distress tolerance (DT), state anxiety, and agoraphobia. The current app-based study recruited 57 participants (38 females, 17 males, and 2 self-disclosed) aged between 18-53 years to explore whether measures of anxiety would predict generalisation. Participants completed questionnaires on IU, DT, state anxiety, and agoraphobic symptoms followed by a threat conditioning task which conditioned participants to fear a counterbalanced image of either a quiet street or a busy street, using a loud scream as the unconditional stimulus. Conditioning and generalisation effects were observed in both contexts for threat expectancy ratings, which supports the feasibility of using online associative learning tasks. Evidence of fear conditioning and generalisation was only evident in the busy context, highlighting the importance of further exploration of clinically relevant generalisation stimuli. None of the measures of anxiety significantly predicted the generalisation of conditioned fear and threat responses. However, this sample had mild levels of anxiety across each measure. Further research is required in samples with clinical levels of these anxiety measures to determine whether they play a role in increased generalisation.