Our new publication in Biological Psychiatry deals with the field of “fear extinction retention” from an empirical meta-research perspective. We discuss terminological vagueness in the field, excessive researchers degrees of freedom, heterogeneity in operationalization of the construct “extinction retention”. Finally, we illustrate the impact of this heterogeneity across 4 datasets. Based on these results, we call for a re-evaluation and re-consideration what we (think) we know about extinction retention.
