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

Emotions are fundamental to our experience and behavior, affecting and motivating all
aspects of our lives. Scientists of various disciplines have been fascinated by emotions for …

Upon increasing levels of threat, animals activate qualitatively different defensive modes,
including freezing and active fight-or-flight reactions. Whereas freezing is a form of …

Escaping from imminent danger is an instinctive behaviour that is fundamental for survival,
and requires the classification of sensory stimuli as harmless or threatening. The absence of …

This article reviews the behavioral neuroscience of extinction, the phenomenon in which a
behavior that has been acquired through Pavlovian or instrumental (operant) learning …

Arrest of ongoing movements is an integral part of executing motor programs. Behavioral
arrest may happen upon termination of a variety of goal-directed movements or as a global …

Uncertainty about a possible future threat disrupts our ability to avoid it or to mitigate its
negative impact and thus results in anxiety. Here, we focus the broad literature on the …

Stress is a precipitating factor for anxiety-related disorders, which are among the leading
forms of psychiatric illness and impairment in the modern world. Rodent-based behavioral …

Evolution has endowed all humans with a continuum of innate, hard-wired, automatically
activated defense behaviors, termed the defense cascade. Arousal is the first step in …

The brain mechanisms of fear have been studied extensively using Pavlovian fear
conditioning, a procedure that allows exploration of how the brain learns about and later …