News Finding: "Our findings suggest that these social means of learning promote superior down-regulation of learned fear, as compared to the sole experiences of personal safety."
Paper Finding: It can be speculated that this process involves the top-down impact on the amygdala by the dorsal mPFC in concert with other prefrontal regions, including the vmPFC, and memoryrelated regions in the hippocampal complex.
News Context: The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, indicates that this type of vicarious social learning may be more effective than direct personal experience in extinguishing fear responses. "Our findings suggest that these social means of learning promote superior down-regulation of learned fear, as compared to the sole experiences of personal safety." Participants who watched a movie clip that included an actual person -- the social learning condition -- showed significantly less fear response to the target face than those who watched a similar clip that didn't include a person.
Paper Context: In our paradigm, watching the calm learning model during extinction might have imbued the CS+ with a safety value resulting in the abolished return of fear during the reinstatement-test stage. It can be speculated that this process involves the top-down impact on the amygdala by the dorsal mPFC in concert with other prefrontal regions, including the vmPFC, and memoryrelated regions in the hippocampal complex. The potency of vicarious extinction in our study is conceptually similar to earlier work in monkeys showing that observing a fearless learning model can cause latent inhibition or "immunization" against subsequent fear learning .