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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2014 Feb 1.
Published in final edited form as: Nat Neurosci. 2013 Jan 28;16(2):146–153. doi: 10.1038/nn.3296

Figure 2.

Figure 2

A model for the development of fear-related disorders. Certain individuals are predisposed to the development of fear-related disorders on the basis of early life experience and genetic background, among other risk factors. When a traumatic event occurs, people learn to fear the cues that are associated with the traumatic event, and this memory consolidates over the course of the subsequent hours and days. The expression of fear comes in several different forms, including flashbacks of the traumatic event, nightmares, avoidance of situations that trigger memory for the traumatic event and altered sympathetic responses such as increased startle. The expression of the fear triggered by memory for the traumatic event may serve to sensitize those who develop psychopathology, resulting in increased fear. Additionally, fear may generalize to cues not associated with the traumatic event in those people who go on to develop a fear-related disorder. In contrast, with resilience, fear responses to cues related to the traumatic event extinguish over time, and discrimination occurs between cues that are associated with the traumatic event and those that are not.