Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely used behavioral paradigm for studying associative learning in rodents. Despite early recognition that subjects may engage in a variety of both conditioned and unconditioned responses, the last several decades have seen the field narrow its focus to measure freezing as the sole indicator of conditioned fear.…

While interest in active avoidance has recently been resurgent, many concerns relating to the nature of this form of learning remain unresolved. By separating stimulus and response acquisition, aversive Pavlovian-instrumental transfer can be used to measure the effect of avoidance learning on threat processing with more control than typical…

A reminder can render consolidated memory labile and susceptible to amnesic agents during a reconsolidation window. For the case of threat memory (also termed fear memory), it has been suggested that extinction training during this reconsolidation window has the same disruptive impact. This procedure could provide a powerful therapeutic principle…

While results from many past studies have implicated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in mediating the expression of sustained negative affect, recent studies have highlighted a more complex role for BNST that includes aspects of fear learning in addition to defensive responding. As BNST is thought to encode ambiguous or…

Fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes and spiders are thought to capture attention due to evolutionary significance. Classical conditioning experiments indicate that these stimuli accelerate learning, while instructed extinction experiments suggest they may be less responsive to instructions. We manipulated stimulus type during instructed aversive…

Fear conditioning studies in rodents allow us to assess vulnerability factors which might underlie fear-based psychopathology such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite PTSD being more prevalent in females than males, very few fear conditioning studies in rodents have tested females. Our study assessed fear conditioning and extinction…

In obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), functional behaviors such as checking that a door is locked become dysfunctional, maladaptive, and debilitating. However, it is currently unknown how aversive and appetitive motivations interact to produce functional and dysfunctional behavior in OCD. Here we show a double dissociation in the effects of…

This series of experiments used rats to compare counterconditioning and extinction of conditioned fear responses (freezing) with respect to the effects of a context shift. In each experiment, a stimulus was paired with shock in context A, extinguished or counterconditioned through pairings with sucrose in context B, and then tested for renewal…

Emotional states influence how stimuli are interpreted. High anxiety states in humans lead to more negative, threatening interpretations of novel information, typically accompanied by activation of the amygdala. We developed a handling protocol that induces long-lasting high and low anxiety-like states in rats to explore the role of state anxiety…

Surviving threats in the environment requires brain circuits for detecting (or anticipating) danger and for coordinating appropriate defensive responses (e.g., increased cardiac output, stress hormone release, and freezing behavior). The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is a critical interface between the "affective…

Although it is currently accepted that the extinction effect reflects new context-dependent learning, this is not so clear during infancy, because some studies did not find recovery of the extinguished conditioned response (CR) in rodents during this ontogenetic stage. However, recent studies have shown the return of an extinguished CR in infant…

These experiments examined the relationship between the neurotrophic factor fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) and individual differences in the expression of conditioned fear. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that rats naturally expressing low levels of contextual or cued fear have higher levels of hippocampal FGF2 relative to rats that express…

It has been suggested that, unlike pure extinction which typically results in the return of the fear response under a variety of circumstances, memory reactivation followed by extinction can attenuate the reemergence of conditioned fear. The reactivation-extinction procedure has attracted the attention of basic and clinical researchers due to its…

Dopamine is broadly implicated in fear-related processes, yet we know very little about signaling dynamics in these neurons during active fear conditioning. We describe the direct imaging of calcium signals of dopamine neurons during Pavlovian fear conditioning using fiber-optic confocal microscopy coupled with the genetically encoded calcium…

Studies on the behavioral mechanisms underlying contextual fear conditioning (CFC) have demonstrated the importance of preshock context exposure in the formation of aversive context memories. However, there has been comparatively little investigation of the effects of context exposure immediately after the shock. Some models predict that…