Nearly 40 years of research on the function of the nucleus accumbens (NAc) has provided a
wealth of information on its contributions to behavior but has also yielded controversies and …

The acquisition of fear associative memory requires brain processes of coordinated neural
activity within the amygdala, prefrontal cortex (PFC), hippocampus, thalamus and brainstem …

Individuals use both passive and active defensive responses to environmental threats. Much
is known about the neural circuits of passive defensive responses (eg, freezing), but less is …

Survival is dictated by an organism's fitness in approaching positive stimuli and avoiding
harm. While a rich literature outlines a role for mesolimbic dopamine in reward and …

Anxiety and fear-related disorders are common and disabling, and they significantly
increase risk for suicide and other causes of morbidity and mortality. However, there is …

Persistent avoidance is a prominent symptom of anxiety disorders and is often resistant to
extinction-based therapies. Little is known about the circuitry mediating persistent …

Highlights•Avoidance research stalled amid debates about fear, reinforcement and
Pavlovian control.•Recent neurobehavioral data are inconsistent with a Pavlovian flight …

Traditional active avoidance tasks have advanced the field of aversive learning and memory
for decades and are useful for studying simple avoidance responses in isolation; however …

Comparatively little is known about how new instrumental actions are encoded in the brain.
Using whole-brain c-Fos mapping, we show that neural activity is increased in the anterior …

Safety learning creates associations between conditional stimuli and the absence of threat.
Studies of human fear conditioning have accumulated evidence for the neural signatures of …