Cue conditioning using a virtual spider discriminates between high and low spider fearful individuals

The fear conditioning paradigm is one of the most commonly used procedures to examine the etiology and treatment of anxiety disorders in laboratories. However, findings with this procedure often do not generalize to clinical settings. Virtual reality (VR) is a promising tool for improving the ecological and predictive validity of fear conditioning. The current study explored whether a classical differential cue conditioning paradigm with spider-fearful participants can be conducted in a VR-environment. Specifically, 25 spider-fearful and 25 non-fearful female students participated in a fear-conditioning experiment with a virtual spider as an unconditioned stimulus (US). The experiment took place in a virtual office in which participants viewed an avatar of themselves sitting at a desk. Conditioned stimuli (CS) were a blue (CS+; 100% reinforcement) and a green (CS-) light emitted by a desk lamp. Fear reactions were measured by fear ratings, skin conductance responses (SCR), and fear potentiated startle responses (FPS). Our results indicated stronger differential fear conditioning for spider-fearful participants than for non-fearful participants. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these results relate specifically to spider-fear, and not to general trait anxiety. We conclude that fear conditioning in VR is a promising tool to improve the validity of classical fear conditioning procedures.