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Life span defined patterns of aversive and appetitive Pavlovian-instrumental transfer and the role of stress

Subject Area General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Term from 2017 to 2020
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 386691645
 
Final Report Year 2020

Final Report Abstract

In our everyday life, we seek to approach positive, rewarding stimuli and situations and to avoid negative, aversive ones. This may critically depend on learning processes, where new understanding, knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences are acquired. These can, in the worst case, result in a negative cycle of maintaining dysfunctional behaviour and states. Human learning starts at birth (it might even start before) and continues until death as a consequence of ongoing interactions between people and their environment. Considerable research on emotional learning in humans has used fear conditioning and extinction paradigms to delineate underlying mechanisms in young and early middle adulthood, yet, little is known about these mechanisms in children and adolescents, and at older age. The age-related alterations in learning mechanisms and the related topological architecture of the functional and structural connectome across the human life span remain largely unknown. Moreover, affective symptoms, in particular depression and anxiety, as well as environmental factors and experiences such as stress (e.g. the experience of early aversive life events) were further assessed. These may critically affect learning and related behaviour, which could trigger mental and physical health problems and chronification. We found that changes in learning processes resulting adaptive approach and avoidance behaviour is particularly important during sensitive periods like adolescence. Here it might differentially affect mental and somatic clinical symptomatologies. Importantly, this also changes into early adulthood in a dynamic nonlinear fashion. This is, for example in the context of chronic pain, no longer significant throughout late adulthood, but the duration of symptoms appears here then as a critical aspect. All this is reflected in structural and functional brain changes, with a clear modulation by stress experiences and circuits as well as an individuals` well-being and life history. Particularly early negative life experiences are significant determinants, and anxiety and depression served as the main effectors on learning and related mental and physical health. This is in line with recent developments and suggestions that basic mechanisms of mental dysfunctions, such as alterations in reinforcement learning, can, in interaction with individual vulnerability and psychosocial stress factors, contribute to syndromes of distress across traditional nosological boundaries. It provides insights into our mechanistic understanding of learning and psychopathology and somatization in different life stage. It also increases our understanding on how stress biases multiple learning-based processes that contribute to the flexibility and rigidity in behavioural adaptation as environmental demands vary across development and the individual. It could also be integrated in earlier developmental perspectives as a unique time window to alter maladaptive trajectories and prevent long-term psychopathological morbidity.

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