Effects of Conditioned Fear on Responsiveness to Pain: Long-Term Retention and Reversibility by Naloxone

The effect of a conditioned fear stimulus (CS) on responsiveness to pain was examined in three experiments. In Experiment 1, a CS that signaled shock attenuated freezing in response to shock, with the attenuation occurring several minutes after the shock. Naloxone blocked the effect of the CS. The effect of the CS, including its reversibility by naloxone, was retained over an interval of 90 days. Experiment 2 showed that this effect on freezing is due to associative fear conditioning, rather than blocking of conditioning to context by a novel cue. In Experiment 3, presenting a fear CS just prior to administering a tail-flick (radiant heat) test of nociception increased the tail-flick latencies; that is, the fear CS apparently induced hyperalgesia rather than analgesia. Because this result makes it difficult to interpret the change in freezing seen in the first experiment as reflecting antinociception, it raises questions about how pain might differentially affect different measures of pain responsiveness. A memory hypothesis is advanced to resolve the different effects obtained with the freezing and tail-flick tests.