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Treatment of fear and anxiety in individuals exposed to traumatic situations is difficult. While some people have believed that immediate treatment might prevent the development of post-traumatic stress disorder, many studies indicate that this approach is not effective (see Journal Watch Psychiatry Sep 11 2006 and Journal Watch Psychiatry Oct 3 2001). These researchers used a fear-conditioning paradigm in rats to test whether behavioral extinction depends on the timing of the intervention or the severity of pre-extinction fear.
The experiments used a standard auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) paired with footshock (unconditioned stimulus [US]). Extinction trials (CS presented without the US) were performed either 15 minutes or 24 hours lat…