How Online Western Dressage Showing Is Quietly Dismantling Fear One Test at a Time

Your brain does not avoid the show ring because it is irrational. It avoids because it has learned, with terrifying efficiency, that avoidance works. Every time you decide not to enter, something like a record gets kept, not literally, the brain is not a logbook, but functionally: the decision not to enter gets tagged as a successful threat response. The anxiety that rose when you thought about signing up drops the moment you close the entry form. Relief floods in. And your brain builds, over repeated instances, the working association: avoided equals survived. This is not a character flaw. This is not a lack of ambition or discipline or love for the sport. This pattern is consistent with how Pavlovian conditioning operates, and it is one of the reasons avoidance-based fear is among the more persistent and well-studied patterns in anxiety research.

What makes it particularly resistant to ordinary willpower is the neurochemistry of that relief. Research using behavioral and physiological measures shows that when an expected threat does not occur, the brain generates a relief response that draws on some of the same reward-related circuitry activated by food, connection, and other positive outcomes, including dopaminergic pathways (Leng et al., 2023; Rosenberg et al., 2024). That overlap is real, though it should be read as shared circuitry rather than identical intensity or experience; relief and, say, the pleasure of a good meal are not the same thing, they simply recruit some common machinery. In people with anxiety-related patterns, stronger relief after avoiding a feared situation predicts more future avoidance, because that relief functions as a reinforcer of the behavior itself (Rosenberg et al., 2024; Michaelsen & Esch, 2023). The brain is not being irrational here. It is drawing a logical conclusion from limited information. You avoided, relief followed, therefore avoiding seemed like the correct response. The threat prediction stays intact. The avoidance habit strengthens. And the practical explanations, distance, cost, timing, readiness, multiply to support both.

Understanding this mechanism is not merely intellectually interesting. It changes what you do next.

When Avoidance Is Adaptive, and When It Isn't

Not all avoidance is maladaptive, and precision here matters because conflating the two generates a kind of self-blame that is neither accurate nor useful. Adaptive avoidance is proportionate to a real, current threat, recedes when safety information is available, and generalizes only narrowly to genuinely related situations (Ball & Gunaydin, 2022). A rider who steps back from a situation that has become genuinely unsafe is using adaptive avoidance. The nervous system is doing its job correctly.

Maladaptive avoidance is characterized by something different: threat appraisals that exceed actual risk, persistence in the presence of repeated safety evidence, and generalization that expands well beyond the original threatening context (Ball & Gunaydin, 2022; Wong et al., 2023). A difficult experience at one show, under one set of conditions, with one particular horse, generalizes to all shows, to all arenas, to the entire idea of competitive riding. The avoidance that began as a specific understandable response gradually colonizes an increasingly large portion of a life. Each avoidance episode feels like a reasonable decision in the moment, while the territory of avoided experience quietly expands.

In practice: Ask yourself honestly whether your reasons for not entering are proportionate to the actual risk of submitting a test from your own arena to a credentialed judge. If you find yourself listing reasons that feel weightier than that actual risk, the rest of this article is written specifically for you.

How Threat Appraisal Becomes Habitual

Maladaptive avoidance is driven at the neural level by altered threat appraisal, habitual responding, and trait avoidance tendency operating below conscious deliberation (Ball & Gunaydin, 2022; Wong et al., 2023). In high-anxiety states, uncertainty combined with negative cognitive bias promotes avoidance that feels entirely rational in the moment but actively blocks the corrective learning that would reduce the anxiety over time (Kenwood et al., 2021). The habitual component is particularly significant. Once avoidance has been reinforced enough times, it begins to operate automatically, triggered by increasingly subtle cues associated with the feared context, without requiring any conscious deliberation. A rider who has avoided shows for several years may find that even reading a show schedule produces the physical arousal that used to be associated only with the warm-up ring. The conditioned response has generalized to the cue. The avoidance fires before the deliberation begins.

A difficult experience at one show, under one set of conditions, can generalize to all shows, to all arenas, to the entire idea of competitive riding. Research on fear generalization in anxiety-related contexts shows this is not unusual and is in fact a predictable feature of how threat memories spread across associated contexts over time (Beckers et al., 2023). One small generalization at a time, the avoided territory expands until the person who once loved competing has a dozen reasonable explanations for why she cannot quite get around to entering.

In practice: If you notice that your reluctance to enter has grown broader over time, if more shows feel impossible than used to, that pattern of generalization is itself diagnostic. It is the signature of maladaptive avoidance, not evidence that competing was never right for you.

The Prefrontal Cortex Under Siege

The neuroscience of why this is so hard to simply think your way out of is worth understanding directly. The prefrontal cortex, which under regulated conditions helps evaluate whether a threat is real and proportionate, becomes less effective at modulating the amygdala's threat responses when anxiety is elevated and persistent (Kenwood et al., 2021). The system that should be updating the threat prediction is instead confirming it. When you try to reason with yourself about whether showing is really that scary, you are attempting to use a cognitive resource that threat arousal specifically degrades. This is why the problem does not resolve through reasoning or reassurance alone. The circuit that needs updating is not primarily a verbal, conscious one. It is updated through experience, not argument.

In practice: The next time you find yourself reasoning through why you should not be afraid, notice that the reasoning is happening in exactly the system that fear most compromises. The argument is not the solution. The experience is.

What Your Body Is Doing While Your Brain Decides

There is a layer of this process that operates below conscious deliberation and deserves honest attention. Research on interoception, the brain's ongoing monitoring of internal bodily states, reveals that the physical sensations associated with fear and anticipatory anxiety can themselves become conditioned signals that trigger the avoidance response before any conscious decision-making has occurred (Icenhour et al., 2021).

The mechanism works as follows. A situation associated with a past threat, anything that resembles the show environment, activates not just the memory of the event but the bodily sensations that accompanied it. The tightening in the chest. The mind going blank. The specific quality of heightened alertness that the nervous system learned to associate with something going wrong. These sensations are not incidental. Research using network analysis found that fear of bodily sensations and time spent monitoring them function as central bridge nodes connecting interoceptive attention to avoidance behaviors and anxiety symptoms, suggesting a self-reinforcing cycle: heightened attention to feared sensations produces more feared sensations, which produce more avoidance (Gessner et al., 2024). The rider who notices her heart rate climbing when she thinks about entering a test is not overreacting. Her nervous system is doing exactly what it was conditioned to do, interpreting that arousal as threat confirmation rather than as ordinary anticipatory activation.

What the research adds to this picture is both clarifying and genuinely encouraging. The difference between interpreting physical arousal as threat confirmation versus as normal pre-performance activation is not fixed (Lazzarelli et al., 2024; Farris et al., 2025). It is trainable. But it requires the kind of corrective experience that allows the body to encounter those sensations in a context where the feared outcome does not follow, where the arousal is present, the evaluation is real, and something good happens anyway.

In practice: The chest tightness you feel when thinking about showing is not weakness and it is not a signal that you are not ready. It is a conditioned response to a context your nervous system learned to treat as threatening. Online showing lets you encounter that sensation in a familiar, regulated environment where the feared outcome consistently does not follow. Over time, the sensation stops meaning danger and starts meaning something closer to anticipation. That shift does not happen through willpower. It happens through repeated experience in the right context.

Why Intensity Is the Wrong Variable

There is a widespread intuition in performance contexts that the way to overcome fear is through direct confrontation, that the rider who is afraid of showing should simply go to shows until the fear subsides. The research on exposure-based fear reduction tells a more nuanced and considerably more useful story.

High-arousal exposures, situations where a person is pushed far past their window of tolerance, do not reliably produce the threat expectancy updating that reduces fear over time. In some cases they can reactivate and even strengthen threat memories rather than extinguishing them (Craske et al., 2022). A large clinical dataset examining 8,484 exposure exercises across 605 patients found that expectancy violation size alone did not predict treatment outcome. What predicted better outcomes was how much patients actually changed their threat expectancy across repeated exposures, meaning the genuine updating of the belief that something bad will happen (Pittig et al., 2022; De Saint Andre et al., 2025). The learning rate, how effectively each experience of safety is actually encoded and integrated, matters considerably more than the intensity of the fear experienced during any single encounter. Research on unconscious exposure in youth phobias found that effective threat updating could occur even without inducing significant subjective arousal, suggesting that high fear during exposure is not a required ingredient for the fear reduction process (Siegel & Peterson, 2024).

The practical implication is significant. Forcing yourself into a maximally anxiety-provoking competitive situation when your nervous system is already saturated with threat predictions is not the optimal way to update those predictions. It may instead confirm them, particularly if performance suffers as a result of the dysregulation, which it reliably does. Research on evaluation apprehension shows that when others are physically present, gaze is salient, and feedback is immediate, anxiety narrows attentional bandwidth in ways that actively interfere with skilled performance (Gong & Kanai, 2025; Gallego et al., 2021). The situation designed to evaluate your riding simultaneously degrades it. The nervous system under high threat does not have access to the same motor patterns, attentional resources, and communicative sensitivity that it has under regulated conditions. This is not a failure of preparation. It is a predictable consequence of how threat states reorganize cognitive and physiological resources.

What produces durable fear recalibration is repeated contact with the feared context under conditions where arousal stays within a range that allows genuine learning to occur, where the nervous system can actually encode the new information that the predicted outcome did not happen (Pittig et al., 2022; Craske et al., 2022).

In practice: The goal is not to be brave. The goal is to create conditions where your nervous system can actually learn. Bravery without the right context often produces evidence that confirms the fear. The right context produces evidence that disconfirms it.

What Online Showing Does to This System

Online Western Dressage showing is not a lesser version of competition. Treating it as a concession to people who cannot handle real showing misreads what the broader exposure literature suggests about how fear recalibration actually works, even though that literature was not built to test this specific format. The pattern it describes, real evaluation with reduced environmental amplifiers, fits the profile of conditions exposure research associates with better outcomes.

It is worth being upfront here: the studies cited below were not conducted on equestrian competitors or on this platform specifically. What follows is a reasoned application of established findings about exposure and arousal to a context that shares their key features, not a direct finding about online Western Dressage itself.

The evaluation is real. The judges hold USEF Western Dressage credentials at either the small "r" (Recorded) or large "R" (Registered) level, the two designations used in this discipline. Scores count toward WDAA's national year-end programs, the YEHP (Year End High Point) and the WHLPAP (WDAA Horse Lifetime Points and Awards Program), though online shows earn half points toward both while live shows earn full points. The feedback is genuine and professionally rendered. What online showing removes are the variables that push arousal past the threshold where the nervous system can learn: the unfamiliar barn with its associated conditioned threat responses, the real-time social gaze of a present audience, the warm-up ring with its compressed social comparison and unpredictable equine behavior, the logistical pressure that arrives before the horse even loads. Research on asynchronous performance environments shows that removing real-time audience presence and immediate social consequence significantly reduces evaluation apprehension while preserving genuine evaluative stakes, and that this reduction in pressure is associated with better performance and better access to trained skills (Lapitan et al., 2021; Hung et al., 2024; Fan et al., 2023). The nervous system stays regulated. The training that has been built quietly at home actually shows up.

And then the scoresheet arrives from a credentialed judge with real commentary on real movements ridden in a real test, and the experience was survivable, and the work showed up on the page. What the brain does with that information is precisely what the research describes as expectancy violation: the predicted threat did not materialize, the threat expectancy updates, and the nervous system's model of that situation becomes slightly less certain that disaster follows (Pittig et al., 2022; Gromer et al., 2023). Do that across enough tests, from enough judges, across enough different virtual show platforms, and you are not merely accumulating points. You are systematically building a competing network of safety memories that gradually comes to rival the threat memories accumulated, possibly for years (Craske et al., 2022).

In practice: A Bronze Medal earned from your own arena is not a lesser version of one earned at an in-person show. The format is different, not the standard. What the exposure research suggests is that lower-arousal, repeatable contact with a real evaluative situation is generally more conducive to durable learning than high-stakes flooding, which is consistent with what online showing offers, though no study has tested this specific platform directly. It builds the self-efficacy and safety memory network that makes everything harder feel more possible.

The Reward Architecture That Changes the Calculation

The reward architecture of the WDAA system matters here in ways that go beyond motivation, and it is worth being precise about why. Research on counterconditioning shows that pairing feared cues with genuine reward reduces costly avoidance more effectively than extinction alone, because it gives the approach motivation a positive target rather than simply trying to neutralize the threat (Hulsman et al., 2023). In chronic pain research, explicitly rewarding approach behavior after extinction was found to attenuate the return of avoidance in ways that extinction alone did not achieve (Gatzounis et al., 2023). The brain that has been choosing avoidance because avoidance produced relief is now encountering an alternative: approach produces reward.

The WDAA points system, the free digital certificate every top-10 YEHP finisher receives at wdaapoints.org, the optional commemorative belt buckle available to Champions, Reserve Champions, and Top 10 placings through WDAA's annual fundraiser, the WDAMA Bronze Medal, the Rookie of the Year jacket, these are not merely motivational accessories, at least not only that. Through the lens of counterconditioning research, they can reasonably be understood as reward signals being paired with the approach behavior that the fear system has been blocking, even though the cited studies tested this dynamic in clinical and laboratory settings rather than in equestrian award programs. Each score is a data point. Each medal pairs reward with approach. Each certificate, each buckle, gives the brain something to weigh against the old equation: approached equals survived, and sometimes more than survived.

In practice: When you earn a Bronze Medal through WDAMA's medal program, you are not just adding an award to your wall. Based on how reward and avoidance circuitry are understood to interact, that experience plausibly registers as a small positive data point in this specific context, one that may make the next approach slightly less costly and slightly more rewarding than the last. That is an inference from the broader research, not a measurement taken on this exact program.

The Self-Efficacy Loop That Sustains It

Self-efficacy is not confidence in the abstract sense. It is the specific belief, built from specific evidence, that you are capable of managing a particular kind of challenge in a particular context (Paersch et al., 2024; Safavi et al., 2025). It is not built through reassurance or positive visualization, though these have their place. It is built through mastery experiences, actual successful engagement with the feared context that provides the nervous system with concrete first-person evidence of capability (Paersch et al., 2024; Zelenak, 2024). Research in adults with anxiety disorders found that higher self-efficacy was associated with a markedly lower likelihood of avoiding feared situations and with greater early progress in exposure-based approaches, specifically because more self-efficacious individuals were more willing to initiate contact with the feared context and therefore generated more corrective learning (Paersch et al., 2024). The self-efficacy and the corrective learning feed each other in a direction you actually want. Each successful test produces a small increment of evidence. The evidence updates the self-efficacy estimate. The updated self-efficacy makes the next test slightly less frightening to approach. The loop, once started, becomes self-reinforcing.

This is why the structural progressiveness of the WDAMA medal program is not just organizationally elegant. It lines up reasonably well with what the research describes, without claiming the program was designed against that research or that it's been tested as such. Bronze at Intro and Basic, with scores from three different judges across three recognized shows, provides multiple distinct corrective experiences from multiple credentialed observers, the kind of varied exposure the literature associates with more durable recalibration (Craske et al., 2022; Pittig et al., 2022). Silver at Levels 1 and 2 extends the approach behavior into progressively more demanding territory. Gold at Levels 3 and 4 represents approach behavior that has traveled a very long way from the first hesitation at an entry form. The journey from Bronze to Gold maps loosely, not precisely, onto what happens in the nervous system during a gradual unwinding of maladaptive avoidance through accumulated corrective experience, reward, and the self-efficacy that both generate.

In practice: You do not need to feel ready before you start. You need to start in order to feel ready. The feeling of readiness is built by the experience, not the other way around.

Community as Nervous System Regulation

Social belonging is not merely emotionally supportive. It is neurobiologically regulatory. The nervous system's threat-detection system is partially calibrated by social context, and the perception of relational safety, of being recognized, valued, and connected to others who share the same domain, actively modulates the threshold at which threat responses are triggered (Michaelsen & Esch, 2023; Cao & Yu, 2023). Research on online learning communities shows that a genuine felt sense of belonging is one of the most reliable predictors of continued participation and one of the strongest buffers against fear-driven withdrawal (Cao & Yu, 2023; Tiedt et al., 2021; Özdoğru et al., 2025). The visible community structures, the recognition rituals, the shared milestones, the ongoing responsiveness of the group, are themselves signals of safety that keep the nervous system in the regulated state where approach behavior is possible (Thacker et al., 2022).

WDAMA's architecture delivers this at multiple levels simultaneously. Membership open to anyone anywhere in the world, a year-end awards ceremony held online so any member can attend regardless of geography, the Rookie of the Year program that explicitly recognizes participation before performance, the medal progression that marks genuine achievement at every stage, all of these create what the research would describe as relational scaffolding that keeps the nervous system regulated while doing the hard thing. Research on communities of practice shows that newcomers who establish early connections and receive explicit recognition remain active considerably longer than those who enter without acknowledgment (Abedini et al., 2023; Evans, 2022). The recognition does not just feel good. It functions as a safety signal that sustains approach motivation through the inevitable moments of difficulty and uncertainty that any genuine competitive journey contains.

In practice: You do not need to be in Massachusetts to belong to WDAMA. You need an internet connection, a horse, and a willingness to begin. The community does the rest.

What to Expect From the Process

The research on fear recalibration is honest about timelines, and that honesty is more useful than false reassurance. Fear does not vanish after one test. The original threat memory does not get erased. What exposure-based learning creates is a competing inhibitory memory, a new network of evidence that the feared outcome is not inevitable, that the situation is manageable, that approach produces something other than disaster (Craske et al., 2022). The old network remains, which is why fear can return in new contexts or after long gaps. But the new network grows stronger with each corrective experience, and over time it comes to dominate the response in familiar and progressively more varied contexts.

The total dose of expectancy change across multiple exposures matters more than any single dramatic encounter with the feared context (De Jong et al., 2024; Pittig et al., 2022). A full show season of online tests, building systematically through the WDAA recognized show calendar available at wdaa.memberclicks.net, submitted through platforms like DressageShowsOnline.com, Spotlight, Janssen Dressage Online, KFOHS, or Thistle Run Equestrian Event, and tracked through the free YEHP program at wdaapoints.org, is not just a points accumulation exercise. It is, test by test, a nervous system education.

The brain that learned, with terrifying efficiency, that avoidance works can also learn, with the right structure around it, that approach is survivable, and sometimes more than that. That structure exists now. Join WDAMA at wdama.org. Find your first show at wdaa.memberclicks.net. Enroll in YEHP at wdaapoints.org. Whether it works exactly the way the research suggests it should is something only your own experience can tell you, but the odds, based on what we know about how fear recalibrates, are reasonably in your favor.

The article gave you the framework. The podcast gives you the full picture, including the psychology of frozen goals, the physiological feedback loop between horse and rider that traditional show environments actively amplify, and the community and award structures that make online Western Dressage showing genuinely meaningful rather than just convenient. Click here when you are ready to hear more.

A note on the research above: the studies cited represent real, peer-reviewed work in anxiety, exposure, and motivation science, and they support the general mechanisms described here, avoidance as reinforcement, exposure as corrective learning, reward as a counterweight to avoidance. None of them were conducted on Western Dressage riders or on WDAA's programs specifically. Where this article applies that research to online showing, it is making a reasoned extension, not reporting a direct finding, and readers who want to verify any individual claim against its source are encouraged to do so.

References

Abedini, A., Abedin, B., & Zowghi, D. (2023). A framework of environmental, personal, and behavioral factors of adult learning in online communities of practice. Information Systems Frontiers, 26, 1201-1218. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-023-10417-2

Ball, T., & Gunaydin, L. (2022). Measuring maladaptive avoidance: From animal models to clinical anxiety. Neuropsychopharmacology, 47, 978-986. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01263-4

Beckers, T., Hermans, D., Lange, I., Luyten, L., Scheveneels, S., & Vervliet, B. (2023). Understanding clinical fear and anxiety through the lens of human fear conditioning. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2, 233-245. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00156-1

Cao, W., & Yu, Z. (2023). Exploring learning outcomes, communication, anxiety, and motivation in learning communities: A systematic review. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02325-2

Craske, M., Treanor, M., Zbozinek, T., & Vervliet, B. (2022). Optimizing exposure therapy with an inhibitory retrieval approach and the OptEx Nexus. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 152, 104069. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2022.104069

De Jong, R., Lommen, M., Van Hout, W., De Jong, P., Nauta, M., & Marel, A. (2024). Effectiveness of exposure-based treatment for childhood anxiety disorders: An open clinical trial. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 83, 101942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2024.101942

De Kleine, R., Hutschemaekers, M., Hendriks, G., Kampman, M., Papalini, S., Van Minnen, A., & Vervliet, B. (2023). Impaired action-safety learning and excessive relief during avoidance in patients with anxiety disorders. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 96, 102698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2023.102698

De Saint Andre, S., Heinig, I., Arolt, V., Bartnick, C., Dannlowski, U., Deckert, J., Domschke, K., Fydrich, T., Goerigk, S., Hamm, A., Hollandt, M., Hoyer, J., Kircher, T., Koelkebeck, K., Lueken, U., Margraf, J., Neudeck, P., Pauli, P., Richter, J., Rief, W., Schneider, S., Straube, B., Strohle, A., Wittchen, H., & Pittig, A. (2025). Same same but different: Threat expectancy change and fear reduction as readouts of exposure rationales are only weakly associated and contribute differentially to treatment outcome in anxiety disorders. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 194, 104856. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2025.104856

Evans, J. (2022). Exploring social media contexts for cultivating connected learning with Black youth in urban communities. Qualitative Sociology, 45, 393-411. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-022-09514-6

Fan, O., Wu, M., Zheng, L., Zhang, L., & Jiao, P. (2023). Integration of artificial intelligence performance prediction and learning analytics to improve student learning in online engineering course. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-022-00372-4

Farris, S., Derby, L., & Kibbey, M. (2025). Getting comfortable with physical discomfort: A scoping review of interoceptive exposure in physical and mental health conditions. Psychological Bulletin, 151, 131-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000464

Gallego, A., McHugh, L., Penttonen, M., & Lappalainen, R. (2021). Measuring public speaking anxiety: Self-report, behavioral, and physiological. Behavior Modification, 46, 782-798. https://doi.org/10.1177/0145445521994308

Gatzounis, R., Gelissen, A., Theuerzeit, D., & Meulders, A. (2023). Rewarding approach behaviour attenuates the return of pain-related avoidance after successful extinction with response prevention. The Journal of Pain. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2023.12.010

Gessner, J., Schulz, J., Melzig, C., & Benke, C. (2024). Role of interoceptive fear and maladaptive attention and behaviors in the escalation of psychopathology: A network analysis. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 53, 524-543. https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2024.2336036

Gong, Z., & Kanai, H. (2025). Effects of appearance modifications on oral presentation anxiety in video conferencing. Scientific Reports, 15. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-15716-z

Gromer, D., Hildebrandt, L., & Stegmann, Y. (2023). The role of expectancy violation in extinction learning: A two-day online fear conditioning study. Clinical Psychology in Europe, 5. https://doi.org/10.32872/cpe.9627

Hulsman, A., Van De Pavert, I., Roelofs, K., & Klumpers, F. (2023). Tackling costly fearful avoidance using Pavlovian counterconditioning. Behavior Therapy, 55, 361-375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2023.07.013

Hung, C., Wu, S., Chen, Y., Soong, C., Chiang, C., & Wang, W. (2024). The evaluation of synchronous and asynchronous online learning: Student experience, learning outcomes, and cognitive load. BMC Medical Education, 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-024-05311-7

Icenhour, A., Petrakova, L., Hazzan, N., Theysohn, N., Merz, C., & Elsenbruch, S. (2021). When gut feelings teach the brain to fear pain: Context-dependent activation of the central fear network in a novel interoceptive conditioning paradigm. NeuroImage, 118229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2021.118229

Kenwood, M., Kalin, N., & Barbas, H. (2021). The prefrontal cortex, pathological anxiety, and anxiety disorders. Neuropsychopharmacology, 47, 260-275. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-021-01109-z

Lapitan, L., Tiangco, C., Sumalinog, D., Sabarillo, N., & Diaz, J. (2021). An effective blended online teaching and learning strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Education for Chemical Engineers, 35, 116-131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ece.2021.01.012

Lazzarelli, A., Scafuto, F., Crescentini, C., Matiz, A., Orru, G., Ciacchini, R., Alfi, G., Gemignani, A., & Conversano, C. (2024). Interoceptive ability and emotion regulation in mind-body interventions: An integrative review. Behavioral Sciences, 14. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14111107

Leng, L., Beckers, T., & Vervliet, B. (2023). What a relief! The pleasure of threat avoidance. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001312

Michaelsen, M., & Esch, T. (2023). Understanding health behavior change by motivation and reward mechanisms: A review of the literature. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1151918

Özdogru, A., Gecer, E., & Bagci, H. (2025). Examining the role of social connectedness and sense of humor on social presence in online learning environments. Education and Information Technologies, 30, 22803-22821. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-025-13666-7

Paersch, C., Recher, D., Schulz, A., Henninger, M., Schlup, B., Kunzler, F., Homan, S., Kowatsch, T., Fisher, A., Horn, A., & Kleim, B. (2024). Self-efficacy effects on symptom experiences in daily life and early treatment success in anxiety patients. Clinical Psychological Science, 13, 178-194. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026231205262

Palombi, T., Chirico, A., Cazzolli, B., Zacchilli, M., Alessandri, G., Filosa, L., Borghi, A., Fini, C., Antoniucci, C., Pistella, J., Alivernini, F., Baiocco, R., & Lucidi, F. (2025). Motivation, psychological needs and physical activity in older adults: A qualitative review. Age and Ageing, 54. https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afaf180

Pittig, A., Heinig, I., Goerigk, S., Richter, J., Hollandt, M., Lueken, U., Pauli, P., Deckert, J., Kircher, T., Straube, B., Neudeck, P., Koelkebeck, K., Dannlowski, U., Arolt, V., Fydrich, T., Fehm, L., Strohle, A., Totzeck, C., Margraf, J., Schneider, S., Hoyer, J., Rief, W., Craske, M., Hamm, A., & Wittchen, H. (2022). Change of threat expectancy as mechanism of exposure-based psychotherapy for anxiety disorders: Evidence from 8,484 exposure exercises of 605 patients. Clinical Psychological Science, 11, 199-217. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026221101379

Rosenberg, B., Barnes-Horowitz, N., Zbozinek, T., & Craske, M. (2024). Reward processes in extinction learning and applications to exposure therapy. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 106, 102911. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2024.102911

Safavi, S., Sadeghi, R., Jamshidi, E., Tedadi, Y., Yaseri, M., Shati, M., Bakhshi, F., & Rahbar, A. (2025). The association between self-efficacy and social support with physical activity in older adults. Scientific Reports, 15. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-20717-z

Siegel, P., & Peterson, B. (2024). Advancing the treatment of anxiety disorders in transition-age youth: A review of the therapeutic effects of unconscious exposure. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.14037

Thacker, I., Seyranian, V., Madva, A., Duong, N., & Beardsley, P. (2022). Social connectedness in physical isolation: Online teaching practices that support under-represented undergraduate students' feelings of belonging and engagement in STEM. Education Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12020061

Tiedt, J., Owens, J., & Boysen, S. (2021). The effects of online course duration on graduate nurse educator student engagement in the community of inquiry. Nurse Education in Practice, 55, 103164. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2021.103164

Wong, A., Aslanidou, A., Malbec, M., Pittig, A., Wieser, M., & Andreatta, M. (2023). A systematic review of the inter-individual differences in avoidance learning. Collabra: Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.77856

Zelenak, M. (2024). Self-efficacy and music performance: A meta-analysis. Psychology of Music, 52, 649-667. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356231222432

Zimmer, C., McDonough, M., Hewson, J., Toohey, A., Din, C., Crocker, P., & Bennett, E. (2022). Social support among older adults in group physical activity programs. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 35, 658-679. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200.2022.2055223