Commentary on fear extinction in the human brain: A meta-analysis of fMRI studies in healthy participants.

Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2018 Jun 30;:

Authors: Jayne M, Shannon H, Carien MVR

Abstract
The recent meta-analysis by Fullana et al. (2018) is both timely and significant, providing a vital milestone towards understanding the neural networks involved in threat extinction in humans. Fullana et al. (2018) examined both threat extinction and recall separately using sophisticated meta-analytic methods based on raw contrast maps. Importantly, the meta-analysis highlighted a lack of consistent activation across studies for key neural "players" in the threat extinction circuit: the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). In the current commentary, we highlight reasons for which this key circuitry may not have resulted from this meta-analysis, and call for a 'gold standard' in the examination of threat extinction using fMRI.

PMID: 29969594 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]