Validation of the Impact of Event Scale With Modifications for COVID-19 (IES-COVID19).

Viral outbreaks can be experienced as disruptive and can be associated with trauma-related stress symptoms. In the current study, we adjusted the Dutch version of the Impact of Event Scale (IES) to assess traumatic stress symptoms related to the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. The psychometric properties of this Impact of Event Scale with modifications for COVID-19 (IES-COVID19) were investigated by administering the IES-COVID19 to 380 university students who participated during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak, upon invitation e-mail.

Prevention and treatment strategies for contextual overgeneralization.

At the core of anxiety disorders lies the tendency to generalize fear from a threatening to a safe situation. A deeper understanding of the mechanisms that facilitate and restrain generalization in humans is therefore needed. Rodent studies showed that pre-exposure to a context that is similar to the threatening context enhanced generalization to the similar context.

One-trial overshadowing: Evidence for fast specific fear learning in humans.

Adaptive defensive actions necessitate a fear learning system that is both fast and specific. Fast learning serves to minimize the number of threat confrontations, while specific learning ensures that the acquired fears are tied to threat-relevant cues only. In Pavlovian fear conditioning, fear acquisition is typically studied via repetitive pairings of a single cue with an aversive experience, which is not optimal for the examination of fast specific fear learning.