Exercise and Fear and Safety Learning

Abstract

Fear conditioning paradigms have been studied for over 100 years and are of great interest to the behavioral and clinical sciences given that several safety learning processes (e.g., extinction learning and recall) are thought to be fundamental to the success of exposure-based therapies for anxiety and related disorders. This chapter provides an overview of preclinical and clinical investigations that examined the effects of exercise on initial fear acquisition, fear extinction learning and consolidation, and return of fear outcomes. This chapter highlights the collective body of evidence suggesting that exercise administered after extinction learning enhances the consolidation and subsequent recall of extinction memories to a greater extent than exercise administered prior to extinction learning. This suggests that the addition of exercise after exposure therapy sessions may improve treatment outcomes for people with anxiety and related disorders. Potential mechanisms are discussed in addition to suggestions for future research to improve our understanding of the effects of exercise on fear conditioning and extinction outcomes.

Keywords: Behavioral tagging; Exposure therapy; Extinction recall; Fear conditioning; Fear extinction; Memory encoding; Memory retrieval; Posttraumatic stress disorder.