Cued aversive classical conditioning in humans: The role of trait-anxiety

Copyright © 2013 Óscar Andión et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. No study so far has specifically addressed the influ-ence of individual differences in trait-anxiety on aver-sive classical conditioning as indexed by the startle reflex response. We compared the startle reflex re-sponses between participants classified as high (n = 25) and low (n = 26) in trait-anxiety while undergoing a single-cue aversive classical conditioning procedure. High trait-anxiety group showed a greater startle re-sponse to the CS relative to the ITI at the post-acqui-sition compared with the pre-acquisition phase. Low trait-anxiety group did not show such a clear pattern of conditioning, and results from this group seem t