Citation

Bentz D, Schiller D. Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Cogn. Sci. 2015; 6(5): 427-439.

Affiliation

Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, and Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/wcs.1353

PMID

26267313

Abstract

The experience of fear is closely linked to the survival of species. Fear can be conceptualized as a brain state that orchestrates defense reactions to threats. To avoid harm, an organism must be equipped with neural circuits that allow learning, detecting, and rapidly responding to threats. Past experience with threat can transform neutral stimuli present at the time of experience into learned threat-related stimuli via associative learning. Pavlovian threat conditioning is the central experimental paradigm to study associative learning. Once learned, these stimulus-response associations are not always expressed depending on context or new experiences with the conditioned stimuli. Neural circuits mediating threat learning have the inherent plasticity to adapt to changing environmental threats. Encounters devoid of danger pave the way for extinction or reconsolidation to occur. Extinction and reconsolidation can both lead to changes in the expression of threat-induced defense responses, but differ in stability and have a different neural basis. This review presents the behavioral models and the system-level neural mechanisms in animals and humans of threat learning and modulation. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Language: en