title: Increased perceived self-efficacy facilitates the extinction of fear in healthy participants.
abstract: Self-efficacy has been proposed as an important element of a successful cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT). Positive changes in perceived self-efficacy have been linked to an improved adaptive emotional and behavioral responding in the context of anxiety-provoking situations. Furthermore, a positive influence of increased self-efficacy on cognitive functions has been confirmed. The present study examined the effect of verbal persuasion on perceived self-efficacy and fear extinction. Healthy participants were subjected to a standardized differential fear conditioning paradigm. After fear acquisition, half of the participants received a verbal persuasion aimed at increasing perceived self-efficacy. The extinction of fear was assessed immediately thereafter on both the implicit and explicit level. Our results suggest that an increased perceived self-efficacy was associated with enhanced extinction, evidenced on the psychophysiological level and accompanied by more pronounced decrements in conditioned negative valence. Changes in extinction were not due to a decrease in overall emotional reactivity to conditioned stimuli (CS). In addition, debriefing participants about the false positive feedback did not affect the processing of already extinguished conditioned responses during a subsequent continued extinction phase. Our results suggest that positive changes in perceived self-efficacy can be beneficial for emotional learning. Findings are discussed with respect to strategies aimed at increasing extinction learning in the course of exposure-based treatments.
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Armin
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Zlomuzica
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Friederike
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Preusser
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Silvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schneider
authors.affiliation: Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-University Bochum Bochum, Germany.
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Margraf
keywords: anxiety disorders; exposure therapy; extinction; fear conditioning; self-efficacy; self-regulation; top-down control