Significance: A brief exposure to a novel environment was recently shown to enhance the extinction of contextual fear probably through a protein synthesis-dependent process of synaptic tagging and capture in the hippocampus. Here we report that this finding can be generalized to the extinction of another fear-motivated task, one-trial inhibitory avoidance. This generalization is important because extinction is used in exposure therapy to treat posttraumatic stress disorder in humans, and this may derive from various forms of fear-related stress. In addition, here we show that the effect of novelty on fear extinction is dependent on dopamine D1 but not D5 receptors in the hippocampus. These findings could be applicable to the exposure therapy of fear memory disorders.