Armin Zlomuzica, Friederike Preusser, Silvia Schneider, Jürgen Margraf
Abstract
Self-efficacy has been proposed as an important element of a successful cognitive behavioral treatment (CBT). Positive changes in perceived self-efficacy have been linked to an improved adaptive emotional and behavioral responding in the context of anxiety-provoking situations. Furthermore, a positive influence of increased self-efficacy on cognitive functions has been confirmed. The present study examined the effect of verbal persuasion on perceived self-efficacy and fear extinction. Healthy participants were subjected to a standardized differential fear conditioning paradigm. After fear acquisition, half of the participants received a verbal persuasion aimed at increasing perceived self-efficacy. The extinction of fear was assessed immediately thereafter on both the implicit and explicit level. Our results suggest that an increased perceived self-efficacy was associated with enhanced extinction, evidenced on the psychophysiological level and accompanied by more pronounced decrements in conditioned negative valence. Changes in extinction were not due to a decrease in overall emotional reactivity to conditioned stimuli (CS). In addition, debriefing participants about the false positive feedback did not affect the processing of already extinguished conditioned responses during a subsequent continued extinction phase. Our results suggest that positive changes in perceived self-efficacy can be beneficial for emotional learning. Findings are discussed with respect to strategies aimed at increasing extinction learning in the course of exposure-based treatments.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 July 2020.
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