The journal of pain : official journal of the American Pain Society
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In chronic pain, pain-related fear seems to overgeneralize to safe stimuli, thus contributing to excessive fear and avoidance behavior. Evidence shows that pain-related fear can be acquired and generalized based on conceptual knowledge. Using a fear conditioning paradigm, we investigated whether this concept-based pain-related fear could also be extinguished. ⋯ This is the first study to demonstrate extinction of concept-based pain-related fear, thus providing evidence for the potential of extinction-based techniques in the treatment of conceptual pain-related fear. PERSPECTIVE: This study demonstrates the acquisition, generalization, and extinction of concept-based pain-related fear in healthy participants. These are the first results to show that concept-based pain-related fear can be extinguished, suggesting that conceptual relationships between fear-inducing stimuli may also be important to consider in clinical practice.