Introducing the Fear Learning and Anxiety Response (FLARe) app and web portal for the remote delivery of fear conditioning experiments

Abstract

Experimental paradigms measuring key psychological constructs can enhance our understanding of mechanisms underlying human psychological well-being and mental health. Delivering such paradigms remotely affords opportunities to reach larger, more representative samples than is typically possible with in-person research. The efficiency gained from remote delivery makes it easier to test replication of previously established effects in well-powered samples. There are several challenges to the successful development and delivery of remote experimental paradigms, including use of an appropriate delivery platform, identifying feasible outcome measures, and metrics of participant compliance. In this paper, we present FLARe (Fear Learning and Anxiety Response), open-source software in the form of a smartphone app and web portal for the creation and delivery of remote fear conditioning experiments. We describe the benefits and challenges associated with the creation of a remote delivery platform for fear conditioning, before presenting in detail the resultant software suite, and one instance of deploying this using the FLARe Research infrastructure. We provide examples of the application of FLARe to several research questions which illustrate the benefits of the remote approach to experiment delivery. The FLARe smartphone app and web portal are available for use by other researchers and have been designed to be user-friendly and intuitive. We hope that FLARe will be a useful tool for those interested in conducting well-powered fear conditioning studies to inform our understanding of the development and treatment of anxiety disorders.

Keywords: Classical conditioning; Fear conditioning; Online research; Pavlovian conditioning; Remote testing; Smartphones.

Fig. 1

The stages of fear conditioning. CS = conditional stimulus, GS = generalisation stimulus, US = unconditional stimulus.

Fig. 2

Infographic for understanding the different aspects of FLARe (codebase, infrastructure, software) and a researcher’s journey from creating an experiment to collecting and exporting data.

Fig. 3

A selection of screenshots from different modules in the FLARe app. Modules unrelated to the fear conditioning task have a green background (basic information and setup instructions), whereas modules related to the task have a white background (task instructions and fear conditioning trials).

Fig. 4

Illustration of how modules can be used to build FLARe experiments. All fully flexible modules are listed on the left, with an example of how they can be used to create a short experiment displayed on the right. Boxes with a solid border indicate mandatory modules that are always included in the study procedure. Grey boxes indicate modules with a fixed position within an experiment. Arrow to the right indicates a participant’s journey through the experiment once they have installed and opened the app.