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Abstract Chronic alcohol use and stress are major risk factors for psychiatric disorders, frequently disrupting emotion regulation and behavioral inhibition. Yet, many individuals exposed to alcohol or stress do not develop pathology, highlighting the need to identify mechanisms that confer vulnerability or resilience. Using a conditioned inhibition paradigm, we examined how prior alcohol intake and acute stress shape fear- and reward-related behavioral control.
Contingency awareness, or the ability to consciously distinguish between threatening and neutral cues, is critical for modulating fear responses in the presence of safety signals (conditioned inhibition). Individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often exhibit poor contingency awareness and deficits in conditioned inhibition, potentially due to atypical perceptions of neutral cues as threatening.
Abstract The discrimination of cues in the environment that signal danger (“fear cue”) is important for survival but depends critically on the discernment of such cues from ones that pose no threat (“safety cues”). In rodents, we previously demonstrated the underlying neurobiological mechanisms that support fear versus safety discrimination and documented that these mechanisms extend to the discrimination of reward as well.
In this issue of Neuron, use a suite of techniques that are typically challenging in infant rat pups to examine the role of dopaminergic input to the basolateral amygdala in social behavior deficits in response to early-life adversity.
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