Overcoming aversive emotional memories requires neural systems that detect when fear
responses are no longer appropriate so that they can be extinguished. The midbrain ventral …

Extinction of fear responses is critical for adaptive behavior and deficits in this form of safety
learning are hallmark of anxiety disorders. However, the neuronal mechanisms that initiate …

Fear extinction does not prevent post-traumatic stress or have long-term therapeutic benefits
in fear-related disorders unless extinction memories are easily retrieved at later encounters …

The amygdala is a brain area critical for the formation of fear memories. However, the nature
of the teaching signal (s) that drive plasticity in the amygdala are still under debate. Here, we …

It is a joyous relief when an event we dread fails to materialize. In fear extinction, the
appetitive nature of an omitted aversive event is not a mere epiphenomenon but drives the …

The ability to extinguish fear memories when threats are no longer present is critical for
adaptive behavior. Fear extinction represents a new learning process that eventually leads …

In humans, activation of the ventral striatum, a region associated with reward processing, is
associated with the extinction of fear, a goal in the treatment of fear-related disorders. This …

Functional neuroanatomy of Pavlovian fear has identified neuronal circuits and synapses
associating conditioned stimuli with aversive events. Hebbian plasticity within these …

The ability to extinguish conditioned fear memory is critical for adaptive control of fear
response, and its impairment is a hallmark of emotional disorders like post-traumatic stress …

Dopamine (DA) neurons are thought to encode reward prediction error (RPE), in addition to
other signals, such as salience. While RPE is known to support learning, the role of salience …