What is Learned Determines How Pavlovian Conditioned Fear is Consolidated in the Brain.

Activity in the basolateral amygdala complex (BLA) is needed to encode fears acquired through contact with both innate sources of danger (i.e., things that are painful) and learned sources of danger (e.

The Opioid Receptor Antagonist Naloxone Enhances First-Order Fear Conditioning, Second-Order Fear Conditioning and Sensory Preconditioning in Rats.

The opioid receptor antagonist naloxone enhances Pavlovian fear conditioning when rats are exposed to pairings of an initially neutral stimulus, such as a tone, and a painful foot shock unconditioned stimulus (US; so-called first-order fear conditioning; Pavlov, 1927). The present series of experiments examined whether naloxone has the same effect when conditioning occurs in the absence of US exposure. In Experiments 1a and 1b, rats were exposed to tone-shock pairings in stage 1 (one trial per day for 4 days) and then to pairings of an initially neutral light with the already conditioned tone in stage 2 (one trial per day for 4 days).

Climate schools plus: An online, combined student and parent, universal drug prevention program.

Early initiation of substance use significantly increases one's risk of developing substance use dependence and mental disorders later in life. To interrupt this trajectory, effective prevention during the adolescent period is critical. Parents play a key role in preventing substance use and related harms among adolescents and parenting interventions have been identified as critical components of effective prevention programs.

Protein synthesis in the basolateral amygdala complex is required for consolidation of a first-order fear memory, but not for consolidation of a higher-order fear memory.

The present series of experiments pursued our recent findings that consolidation of a second-order fear memory requires neuronal activity, but not de novo protein synthesis, in the basolateral amygdala complex (BLA). It used a modified second-order conditioning protocol in which rats were exposed to S1-shock pairings in stage 1 and pairings of the serial S2-S1 compound and shock in stage 2. Experiment 1 showed that responding (freezing) to S2 in this protocol is conditional on its compounding with S1 in stage 2 (Experiment 1), and therefore, the result of associative formation.