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The hallmark of successful treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related disorders is extinction of a learned association between an event or context and a fear response; extinction is accomplished by exposure to the conditioned stimulus (e.g., memories of a traumatic event) in the absence of fearful stimuli (e.g., trauma). In rodents, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) affecting infralimbic structures facilitates fear extinction. Researchers have now applied this finding in an experiment with 28 healthy people.
Fear conditioning on the first day was achieved by pairing finger shocks with red and blue lights, but not with a yellow light (the control for fear learning). During extinction on day 2, the red and…