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 …

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 …

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 …

Dopamine is critical for many processes that drive learning and memory, including
motivation, prediction error, incentive salience, memory consolidation, and response output …

Research on dopamine lies at the intersection of sophisticated theoretical and
neurobiological approaches to learning and memory. Dopamine has been shown to be …

Traumatic events can engender persistent excessive fear responses to trauma reminders
that may return even after successful treatment. Extinction, the laboratory analog of behavior …

Using shock avoidance procedures to study conditioned behavioral responses has a rich
history within the field of experimental psychology. Such experiments led to the formulation …

Recent work on the extinction of fear-motivated learning places emphasis on its putative
circuitry and on its modulation. Extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously …

Learning to associate certain contexts with threat and adapting to changing environmental
contingencies by learning that such contexts are no longer associated with threat are both …