From the article: People with and without anxiety disorders learn to fear a threat equally quickly, according to new research. However, people with anxiety disorders tend to have a harder time learning to stop being afraid on a physiological level (when the threat is gone) compared to healthy individuals. These trends can be detected by monitoring fear-potentiated startle responses.

The study was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

Learning to recognize threats is a capacity that is of extreme importance for survival. However, problems in these processes, such as situations when an individual easily learns to associate certain stimuli with danger but fails to extinguish this association once the stimuli in question are not longer associated with danger, have long been linked to the development and maintenance of pathological anxiety.

Some theorists have linked the fact that anxiety symptoms start developing in late childhood and early adolescence with variations in the maturation of neural circuitry supporting threat learning. This is often explored experimentally by using the so-called differential threat conditioning study plans.