Grant: Project Grant

Prolonged exposure therapy, which consists of repeated exposure to fear-eliciting cues, aims to decouple those cues from fear. While highly effective, this approach leaves patients vulnerable to relapse. One potential reason for this treatment failure is the field's predominant focus on primary fear triggers - cues directly associated with a traumatic or aversive event. However, fear is not confined to these primary triggers; it can spread across time, linking past and future experiences and giving rise to secondary fear triggers. To develop more effective treatments for fear and anxiety, we must move beyond primary triggers and understand how fear generalizes to secondary cues, that is, cues that were never directly linked to trauma but that acquire fear through association with primary triggers. This proposal takes a multifaceted approach to identify the key factors driving the development of secondary fear triggers and to map the neural networks that enable fear to spread across time. Our ultimate goal is to establish a foundational framework for understanding secondary fear triggers, paving the way for novel behavioral, pharmacological and potentially even neurobiological strategies to treat fear- and anxiety-related disorders.