In a recent study, we demonstrated that rats prefer mutual rewards in a Prosocial Choice Task. Here, employing the same task, we show that the integrity of basolateral amygdala was necessary for the expression of mutual reward preferences. Actor rats received bilateral excitotoxic (n=12) or sham lesions (n=10) targeting the basolateral amygdala and were subsequently tested in a Prosocial Choice...

Testosterone and cortisol have been proposed to influence aggressive behavior by altering the neural processing of facial threat signals. However, this has not been investigated in direct social interactions. Here, we explored the joint impact of testosterone, cortisol, and brain reactivity to anger expressions on women's reactive aggression in the Social Threat Aggression Paradigm (STAP). The ...

Brain function depends on coordinated interactions in spatially distributed neuronal populations. Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to monitor the activity of large groups of neurons. Although significant progress has been made in analyzing neuronal interactions across large samples of simultaneously recorded cells, most of the available approaches do not allow direct ...

Initially reported in dopamine neurons, neural correlates of prediction errors have now been shown in a variety of areas, including orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum, and amygdala. Yet changes in neural activity to an outcome or cues that precede it can reflect other processes. We review the recent literature and show that although activity in dopamine neurons appears to signal prediction ...

It is well known that stressful experiences may affect learning and memory processes. Less clear is the exact nature of these stress effects on memory: both enhancing and impairing effects have been reported. These opposite effects may be explained if the different time courses of stress hormone, in particular catecholamine and glucocorticoid, actions are taken into account. Integrating two pop...

This study tested whether firing rate and spike shape could be used to distinguish projection cells from interneurons in extracellular recordings of basolateral amygdala (BLA) neurons. To this end, we recorded BLA neurons in isoflurane-anesthetized animals with tungsten microelectrodes. Projection cells were identified by antidromic activation from cortical projection sites of the BLA. Although...

We report that post-training inactivation of basolateral amygdala region (BLA) with muscimol impaired memory for contextual-fear conditioning (as measured by freezing) and intra-BLA norepinephrine enhanced this memory. However, pre-exposure to the context eliminated both of these effects. These findings provide a likely explanation of why an earler study failed to observe that the BLA modulates...

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 evidence suggests that extinction of aversive memories engages reward-related circuits, but a causal relationship between activity in a reward circuit and fear extinction has not been demonstrated. Here, we ...

2 Summary In this chapter, we review data from appetitive conditioning studies using measures of pavlovian approach behaviour and of the effects of pavlovian conditioned stimuli on instrumental behaviour, including the pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer effect and conditioned reinforcement. These studies consistently demonstrate double dissociations of function between the basolateral area and ...

The amygdala is a complex structure that plays its role in perception and threat-related behaviour by activity of its specific nuclei and their separate networks. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the role of the basolateral amygdala in face and context processing. Five individuals with focal basolateral amygdala damage and 12 matched controls viewed fe...