Published in Scientific Reports
Early adolescent adversity increases adult risk for anxiety disorders. The ventrolateral periaqueductal gray (vlPAG) and neighboring dorsal raphe (DR) are integral to threat prediction, and are responsive to acute stressors. Here, we tested the hypothesis that early adolescent adversity reshapes vlPAG/DR threat-related cue activity and threat proba...
Published in Scientific Reports
In fear conditioning, where a conditioned stimulus predicts the arrival of an aversive stimulus, the animal encodes the time interval between the two stimuli. Here we monitored respiration to visualize anticipatory behavioral responses in an odor fear conditioning in rats, while recording theta (5–15 Hz) and gamma (40–80 Hz) brain oscillatory activ...
Published in Scientific Reports
The biological mechanisms involved in fear transmission within families have been scarcely investigated in humans. Here we studied (1) how children acquired conditioned fear from observing their parent, or a stranger, being exposed to a fear conditioning paradigm, and (2) the subsequent fear extinction process in these children. Eighty-three child-...
Published in Molecular Brain
Most individuals undergo traumatic stresses at some points in their life, but only a small proportion develop stress-related disorders such as anxiety diseases and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although stress susceptibility is one determinant of mental disorders, the underlying mechanisms and functional implication remain unclear yet. We f...
Published in Scientific Reports
Lesioning or inactivating the infralimbic (IL) subregion of the medial prefrontal cortex before acquisition produces more generalized and extinction-resistant fear memories. However, whether and how it modulates memory specificity and extinction susceptibility while consolidation takes place is still unknown. The present study aims to investigate t...
Published in Nature Communications
The vCA1-BA projection is enriched in shock responsive neurons, which are necessary for fear memory encoding and become correlated with a network of neurons during retrieval. Here the authors show that the magnitude of vCA1 correlated activity is proportional to memory strength and requires the shock response during encoding.
Published in Behavioural brain research
The T-type calcium channel blocker, Z944, has been used as a pharmacological tool to assess T-type calcium channel function and examined for use as an anti-epileptic. As Z944 affects fear learning and memory in a rodent model of absence epilepsy, it is important to determine the effect of Z944 on learning and memory in a non-disease outbred rodent ...
Published in Scientific Reports
Animals can remember a situation associated with an aversive event. Contextual fear memory is initially encoded and consolidated in the hippocampus and gradually consolidated in multiple brain regions over time, including the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, it is not fully understood how PFC neurons contribute to contextual fear memory for...
Published in Scientific Reports
When a cue no longer predicts a threat, a diminished ability to extinguish or reverse this association is thought to increase risk for stress-related disorders. Despite the clear clinical relevance, the mediating neurochemical mechanisms of threat reversal have received relatively little study. One neurotransmitter implicated in rodent research of ...
Published in NeuroImage. Clinical
Neuronal nitric oxide synthase (NOS-I) impacts on fear/anxiety-like behavior in animals. In humans, the short (S) allele of a functional promotor polymorphism of NOS1 (NOS1 ex1f-VNTR) has been shown to be associated with higher anxiety and altered fear conditioning in healthy subjects in the amygdala and hippocampus (AMY/HIPP). Here, we explore the...
