Decades of research has identified the brain areas that are involved in fear, fear extinction,
anxiety and related defensive behaviours. Newly developed genetic and viral tools …

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 …

It has been proposed that memories are encoded by modification of synaptic strengths
through cellular mechanisms such as long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression …

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 …

We review recent work on the role of intrinsic amygdala networks in the regulation of
classically conditioned defensive behaviors, commonly known as conditioned fear. These …

Research on avoidance conditioning began in the late 1930s as a way to use laboratory
experiments to better understand uncontrollable fear and anxiety. Avoidance was initially …

Appropriate responses to an imminent threat brace us for adversities. The ability to sense
and predict threatening or stressful events is essential for such adaptive behaviour. In the …

Animals learn to avoid harmful situations by associating a neutral stimulus with a painful
one, resulting in a stable threat memory. In mammals, this form of learning requires the …

How sensory information is transformed by learning into adaptive behaviors is a
fundamental question in neuroscience. Studies of auditory fear conditioning have revealed …

The hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin (OT), which controls childbirth and lactation,
receives increasing attention for its effects on social behaviors, but how it reaches central …