Introduction
Specific fears are highly prevalent in the general population (cf. Wardenaar et al. Exposure therapy is an effective therapeutic intervention to reduce fear and avoidance in patients with specific fears (Hoffman and Smits Behavioral interventions and pharmacological manipulations have been proposed to promote extinction learning and exposure therapy outcome (Craske et al. Stress might equally promote exposure therapy outcome (Meir Drexler et al. Pre-extinction stress can promote subsequent fear extinction learning and extinction retrieval (Meir Drexler et al. In the present study, we recruited women with multiple fears (spiders and cockroaches) and asked whether pre-exposure stress induction via socially evaluated cold-pressor test (SECPT; Schwabe et al. 