The therapeutic strategy of repeated exposure is effective for fears and anxiety disorders, but a substantial number of individuals fail to respond. Translation from the basic science of inhibitory extinction learning and inhibitory regulation offers strategies for increasing response rates to exposure therapy. The underlying theories and evidence for these strategies will be presented, including prediction error correction (‘violation of expectancy’), variability across stimuli and contexts to enhance generalization, interference with hippocampal activation to enhance context generalization, bridging techniques to retrieve exposure memories in novel contexts, induction of positive valence, and linguistic processing (‘affect labeling’) of feared stimuli.