Disrupted operations of the reward circuit underlie major emotional disorders, including depression, which commonly arise following early life stress / adversity (ELA). However, how ELA enduringly impacts reward circuit functions remains unclear. We characterize a stress-sensitive projection connecting basolateral amygdala (BLA) and nucleus accumbe...
Published in Nature
The ability to associate temporally segregated information and assign positive or negative valence to environmental cues is paramount for survival. Studies have shown that different projections from the basolateral amygdala (BLA) are potentiated following reward or punishment learning1-7. However, we do not yet understand how valence-specific infor...
Oxytocin is hypothesized to promote social interactions by enhancing the salience of social stimuli. While previous neuroimaging studies have reported that oxytocin enhances amygdala activation to face stimuli in autistic men, effects in autistic women remain unclear. In this study, the influence of intranasal oxytocin on activation and functional ...
Active avoidance behavior, in which an animal performs an action to avoid a stressor, is crucial for survival and may provide insight into avoidance behaviors seen in anxiety disorders. Active avoidance requires the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), which is thought to regulate avoidance via downstream projections to the striatum and amygdala....
Adaptive reward-related decision making requires accurate prospective consideration of the specific outcome of each option and its current desirability. These mental simulations are informed by stored memories of the associative relationships that exist within an environment. In this review, I discuss recent investigations of the function of circui...
Exposure to traumatic stress leads to persistent, deleterious behavioral and biological changes in both human and non-human species. The effects of stress are not always consistent, however, as exposure to different stressors often leads to heterogeneous effects. The intensity of the stressor may be a key factor in determining the consequences of s...
Published in The Korean Journal of Pain
Background Migraine headaches have been associated with sensory hyperactivity and anomalies in social/emotional responses. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the potential involvement of orexin 1 receptors (Orx1R) within the basolateral amygdala (BLA) in the modulation of pain and psychosocial dysfunction in a nitroglycerin (NTG)-indu...
Astrocytes release gliotransmitters via connexin 43 (Cx43) hemichannels into neighboring synapses, which can modulate synaptic activity and are necessary for fear memory consolidation. However, the gliotransmitters released, and their mechanisms of action remain elusive. Here, we report that fear conditioning training elevated Cx43 hemichannel acti...
Adaptive reward-related decision making requires accurate prospective consideration of the specific outcome of each option and its current desirability. Often this information must be inferred based on the presence of predictive environmental events. The basolateral amygdala (BLA) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) are two key nodes in the circ...
Adaptive reward-related decision making often requires accurate and detailed representation of potential available rewards. Environmental reward-predictive stimuli can facilitate these representations, allowing one to infer which specific rewards might be available and choose accordingly. This process relies on encoded relationships between the cue...
