A ventral striatal learning signal reflecting individual differences in the success of fear extinction.

Overview

1. Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR), Mainz, Germany
2. School of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China
3. Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
4. Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatic Medicine, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) & German Center for Mental Health (DZPG), partner site Halle-Jena-Magdeburg, Halle, Germany
5. Neuroimaging Center (NIC), Focus Program Translational Neuroscience (FTN), Johannes Gutenberg University Medical Center, Mainz, Germany

Abstract

Individual differences in fear extinction learning are centrally involved in anxiety vulnerability. We here investigate individual extinction differences using a model-free, data-driven approach, by applying Latent Class Growth Modeling (LCGM) to four in-house data sets from altogether N = 234 healthy male participants. This revealed two distinct trajectory classes: fast extinguishers and slow extinguishers. This pattern was replicated in two independent public data sets (total N = 275, female and male). In a subset of the in-house samples with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data (n = 122 males), we investigated the neural correlates of class membership, focusing on the ventral striatum (VS), a key area previously implicated in encoding extinction prediction errors (EPE). We found that fast extinguishers exhibited VS activity at the time of unconditioned stimulus omission early in extinction, consistent with an EPE signal, whereas this signal only appeared late in extinction in slow extinguishers. These findings suggest that extinction success is shaped by how the VS learns safety.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper says that its authors' code is available on request: it was not published with the paper, so there is nothing to verify.

Code availability

Analysis code for LCGM on SCR data is available from the corresponding author upon request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Tracing map

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Data

Datasets cited

• osf:j8tpz, at OSF; found in “Data availability”

Data availability

Derivative data (trial-by-trial SCR, contrast and beta estimates) is available at 10.17605/OSF.IO/J8TPZ.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

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Version 1, 30 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 5 authors, 2 keywords, 11 MeSH terms, 2 funders, 59 references.

Cite

This paper

Andres, E., Chuan-Peng, H., Gerlicher, A. M. V., Tüscher, O., & Kalisch, R. (2026). A ventral striatal learning signal reflecting individual differences in the success of fear extinction. Molecular psychiatry, 31(8), 4450-4462. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-026-03565-9

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