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Preclinical studies suggest that cannabinoid 1 (CB1) receptors help to regulate fear responses. In this laboratory-based study using a virtual reality paradigm, investigators assessed 142 normal individuals to examine whether two CB1 polymorphisms affect fear acquisition and extinction.
In several alternating scenarios, participants intermittently received unpleasant painful shocks, with and without specific cues, and were examined for the extent to which they initially acquired fears and subsequently adapted to and extinguished their fear response to these cues. Participants were genotyped for two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; A and G alleles) found in the promoter and coding regions of the CB1 gene. Genotype groups did not differ …