摘要：The COVID-19 pandemic represents a major disruption to our daily lives. Many people are confronted with health, financial and existential fears or even trauma-like or traumatic experiences. Current studies have described an increase in stress, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms in connection with the pandemic. Fear processing and its regulation are central mechanisms in the development and maintenance of PTSD and anxiety disorders. Patients not only commonly show impairments in fear learning but also in fear generalization, a biased fear response to stimuli or situations perceptually similar to the original trauma. A high burden of the pandemic may constitute a risk factor for both enhanced fear acquisition and generalization. In a preregistered online study with healthy university students, we investigated whether subjective and objective COVID-19 related burden (anxiety and restrictions in daily life) affect learning of fear and fear generalization. Method: We used a differential fear conditioning paradigm with a traumatic film clip as the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), and collected UCS-expectancy as the main measure of interest. Results: First results show that COVID-19 related anxiety correlates with depression and anxiety symptomatology, as well as perceived stress. Furthermore, participants with higher scores of COVID-19 related anxiety show impaired fear learning (lower fear discrimination), as well as higher fear generalization. Conclusions: Final results will be discussed at the meeting.
