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Authors & Affiliations
Maria Alemany, Martijn E. Wokke, Ai Koizumi
Abstract
Recent studies in rodents suggest the potential functions of bodily feedback signals to alleviate fear, shedding light on new forms of non-invasive interventions. First, learning proactive coping actions to avoid threats leads to persistent fear-alleviating effects relative to passive extinction procedures (Cain and LeDoux 2007), suggesting that bodily actions could facilitate resilience to learned threats. Second, physiological bodily responses under threat, such as changes in respiration and heart rate, serve as feedback signals to regulate fear (Karalis & Sirota, Nat Comm, 2022; Hsueh et al., Nature 2023). However, whether manipulating bodily signals can alleviate fear among humans remains unclear. In this study, we leverage the unique ability of humans to voluntarily control their bodily actions and physiological rhythms to tackle how self-embodied actions and interoceptive signals, such as respiratory frequency, could non-invasively alleviate fear memory. In the first study, participants underwent an ecologically-valid fear conditioning task in a 3D virtual space and we found that embodied movement through active-avoidance training alleviates long-term fear memory relative to less-embodied procedures (Alemany et al., iScience 2024). In the second experiment, participants were instructed to breathe at certain frequencies during a fear memory task. Preliminary results showed that manipulation of respiration rhythm can modulate fear memory performance. Together, our results suggest that self-produced bodily actions and rhythms could alleviate fear memory in humans, which may contribute to overcoming a societal challenge to achieve safe and low-cost methods for fear and anxiety alleviation.