In nature, animals display defensive behaviors that reflect the spatiotemporal distance of
threats. Laboratory-based paradigms that elicit specific defensive responses in rodents have …

Learning to recognize and respond to potential threats is crucial for survival. Pavlovian
threat conditioning represents a key paradigm for investigating the neurobiological …

The precise functional role of the hippocampus remains a topic of much debate. The
dominant view is that the dorsal (or posterior) hippocampus is implicated in memory and …

Once acquired, a fearful memory can persist for a lifetime. Although learned fear can be
extinguished, extinction memories are fragile. The resilience of fear memories to extinction …

Fear memory is the best-studied form of memory. It was thoroughly investigated in the past
60 years mostly using two classical conditioning procedures (contextual fear conditioning …

Progress in clinical and affective neuroscience is redefining psychiatric illness as
symptomatic expression of cellular/molecular dysfunctions in specific brain circuits. Post …

PTSD is characterized by the persistence of intense reactions to reminders of a traumatic
event, altered mood, a sense of imminent threat, disturbed sleep, and hypervigilance …

We propose a Survival Optimization System (SOS) to account for the strategies that humans
and other animals use to defend against recurring and novel threats. The SOS attempts to …

Discovering the stress-buffering effects of social relationships has been one of the major
findings in psychobiology in the last century. However, an understanding of the underlying …

The ability to differentiate stimuli predicting positive or negative outcomes is critical for
survival, and perturbations of emotional processing underlie many psychiatric disease …