 We are interested in studying Pavlovian aversive context conditioning in healthy controls and patients with anxiety disorders. We will examine the extent to which participants learn to discriminate between dangerous and safe virtual contexts, and how this learning maps to the neural networks underlying anxiety and context coding. We expect successful learning of the contextual fear response in healthy controls, as evidenced by differential skin conductance response and neural activation to safe vs. threat context. Accordingly, we anticipate higher neuronal activity in the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. These findings will be accompanied with increased hippocampus-prefrontal cortex connectivity during approach and exploration of the dangerous context, and increased amygdala activation during anticipation of shock in the dangerous context. Physiologically, SCR will increase in threat context compared to safe context. However, anxious patients are expected to fail to learn to differentiate safe from threat context, exhibiting increased SCR and neural activation in both safe and threat contexts, an index of contextual generalization of fear. Particularly, the lack of contextual fear discrimination in anxious patients will be associated with weaker hippocampal activation to contextual learning. To examine differential context fear conditioning, we will use a virtual reality VR paradigm. VR provides an optimal way to probe spatial navigation and simulates context. The VR task presents an outdoor space, which comprises a dangerous probabilistic electrical shocks and a safe no shocks location. Healthy controls and patients with anxiety disorders will be compared on their physiological and neural reactivity during task performance. Preliminary psychophysiological data suggest that the proposed procedure is an effective way to promote different responses to a safe and dangerous spatial location. Hence, we anticipate that this procedure will allow us to examine brain correlates of differential contextual fear responses in humans and compare them between healthy participants and patients diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. 