The model of threat conditioning and extinction has been used to disentangle the mechanisms underlying how threat is learned and then regulated, through extinction learning. Past studies have demonstrated impaired memory of fear extinction in PTSD and anxiety patients relative to healthy controls [1,2,3]. Recall of the fear extinction memory is clinically relevant given that exposure-based therapy, which is often used to treat anxiety and fear-related pathologies, relies on the principles of extinction learning. Failure to consolidate and later recall the extinction memory trace would result in elevated fear levels, which would contribute to maintain and/or exacerbate the clinical symptoms.

The Research Domain of Criteria (RDoC) aims to study dimensions of psychopathology across individuals irrespective of their diagnosis. The rationale for this approach is that some dimensions, such as acute threat, cut across diagnoses, suggesting shared mechanisms of psychopathology. Will the RDoC approach provide novel information about the mechanisms of psychopathology?

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