Gender Differences in the Acquisition of Unconscious and Conscious Fear Memory

In recent years, more and more researchers paid attention to the phenomenon that female are more likely to suffer from anxiety disorder. However, previous studies on gender differences in fear memory acquisition only considered conscious fear memory learning, but neglected the role of unconscious fear conditioning. Based on this, this study presents both unconscious and conscious conditioned stimuli in the process of fear conditioning, so as to investigate the gender differences in the acquisition process of unconscious and conscious fear memory simultaneously. The results show that males can rapidly acquire conscious fear memories and successfully identify unconscious safety information; in contrast, females are slower in acquiring conscious fear memory and show deficits in unconscious safety learning. According to these results, it may be a way to reduce the risk of anxiety disorder by strengthening the ability of individual female's unconscientious safety learning in education.