death fear is defined as a morbid, abnormal or persistent anxiety of one's own death or the process of his/her dying. fear of death is a feeling of dread, apprehension or solicitude (anxiety) when one thinks of the process of dying, or ceasing to ‘be’. nurses, as healthcare professionals, are exposed to dying patients and their beliefs about death phenomenon can impact on their general hea...

Fear learning is a rapid and persistent process that promotes defense against threats and reduces the need to relearn about danger. However, it is also important to flexibly readjust fear behavior when circumstances change. Indeed, a failure to adjust to changing conditions may contribute to anxiety disorders. A central, yet neglected aspect of fear modulation is the ability to flexibly shift f...

Following treatment of fear-related disorders, return of fear remains a common occurrence. Currently, the presence of safety signals during treatment procedures is considered harmful, yet recent findings have demonstrated that certain safety signals (social-support figures) lead to enhanced fear extinction and thus might reduce return of fear. Here, we tested the effect of social-support-figure...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that occurs following an unexpected exposure to a severe psychological event. A history of a brief trauma is reported to affect a risk for future PTSD development; however, little is known about the mechanisms by which a previous trauma exposure drives the sensitivity to a late-coming trauma. Using a mouse PTSD model, we found that a ...

The fear-avoidance model postulates that in chronic low back pain (CLBP) a fear of movement is acquired in the acute phase, which leads to subsequent avoidance of physical activity and contributes to the pain syndrome's becoming chronic. In the present event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of the neural correlates of the fear of movement, 60 women (30 CLBP patients, 1...