BackgroundSocial alarm calls alert animals to potential danger and thereby promote group survival. Adult laboratory rats in distress emit 22-kHz ultrasonic vocalization (USV) calls, but the question of whether these USV calls directly elicit defensive behavior in conspecifics is unresolved.Methodology/Principal FindingsThe present study investigated, in pair-housed male rats, whether and how the conditioned fear-induced 22-kHz USVs emitted by the ‘sender’ animal affect the behavior of its partner, the ‘receiver’ animal, when both are placed together in a novel chamber. The sender rats’ conditioned fear responses evoked significant freezing (an overt evidence of fear) in receiver rats that had previously experienced an aversive event but not in naïve receiver rats. Permanent lesions and reversible inactivations of the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN) of the thalamus effectively blocked the receivers’ freeezing response to the senders' conditioned fear responses, and this occurred in absence of lesions/inactivations impeding the receiver animals' ability to freeze and emit 22-kHz USVs to the aversive event per se.Conclusions/SignificanceThese results—that prior experience of fear and intact auditory system are required for receiver rats to respond to their conspecifics' conditioned fear responses—indicate that the 22-kHz USV is the main factor for social transmission of fear and that learning plays a crucial role in the development of social signaling of danger by USVs.

Stress is a biologically ubiquitous factor that, when perceived uncontrollable by humans and animals, can have lingering adverse effects on brain and cognitive functions. We have previously reported that rats that experienced inescapable-unpredictable stress subsequently exhibited decreased stability of firing rates of place cells in the CA1 hippocampus, accompanied by impairments in CA1 long-term synaptic potentiation and spatial memory consolidation. Because the elevated level of glucocorticoid hormones and the heightened amygdalar activity have been implicated in the emergence of stress effects on the hippocampus, we investigated whether administration of corticosterone and electrical stimulation of the amygdala can produce stress-like alterations on hippocampal place cells. To do so, male Long-Evans rats chronically implanted with tetrodes in the hippocampus and stimulating electrodes in the amygdala were placed on a novel arena to forage for randomly dispersed food pellets while CA1 place cells were monitored across two recording sessions. Between sessions, animals received either corticosterone injection or amygdalar stimulation. We found that amygdalar stimulation reliably evoked distress behaviors and subsequently reduced the pixel-by-pixel correlation of place maps across sessions while corticosterone administration did not. Also, the firing rates of place cells between pre- and post-amygdalar stimulation recording sessions were pronouncedly different whereas those between pre- and post-corticosterone injection recording sessions were not. These results suggest that the heightened amygdalar activity, but not the elevated level of corticosterone per se, reduces the stability of spatial representation in the hippocampus by altering the firing rates of place cells in a manner similar to behavioral stress.

Epigenetic mechanisms result in persistent changes at the cellular level that can lead to long-lasting behavioral adaptations. Nucleosome remodeling is a major epigenetic mechanism that has not been well explored with regards to drug-seeking behaviors. Nucleosome remodeling is performed by multi-subunit complexes that interact with DNA or chromatin structure and possess an ATP-dependent enzyme to disrupt nucleosome-DNA contacts and ultimately regulate gene expression. Calcium responsive transactivator (CREST) is a transcriptional activator that interacts with enzymes involved in both histone acetylation and nucleosome remodeling. Here, we examined the effects of knocking down CREST in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core on drug-seeking behavior and synaptic plasticity in male mice as well as drug-seeking in male rats. Knocking down CREST in the NAc core results in impaired cocaine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP) as well as theta-induced long-term potentiation in the NAc core. Further, similar to the CPP findings, using a self-administration procedure, we found that CREST knockdown in the NAc core of male rats had no effect on instrumental responding for cocaine itself on a first-order schedule, but did significantly attenuate responding on a second-order chain schedule, in which responding has a weaker association with cocaine. Together, these results suggest that CREST in the NAc core is required for cocaine-induced CPP, synaptic plasticity, as well as cocaine-seeking behavior. This study demonstrates a key role for the role of Calcium responsive transactivator (CREST), a transcriptional activator, in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) core with regard to cocaine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP), self-administration (SA), and synaptic plasticity. CREST is a unique transcriptional regulator that can recruit enzymes from two different major epigenetic mechanisms: histone acetylation and nucleosome remodeling. In this study we also found that the level of potentiation in the NAc core correlated with whether or not animals formed a CPP. Together the results indicate that CREST is a key downstream regulator of cocaine action in the NAc.

A fundamental property of extinction is that the behavior that is suppressed during extinction can be unmasked through a number of postextinction procedures. Of the commonly studied unmasking procedures (spontaneous recovery, reinstatement, contextual renewal, and rapid reacquisition), rapid reacquisition is the only approach that allows a direct comparison between the impact of a conditioning trial before or after extinction. Thus, it provides an opportunity to evaluate the ways in which extinction changes a subsequent learning experience. In five experiments, we investigate the behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms of postextinction reconditioning. We show that rapid reconditioning of unsignaled contextual fear after extinction in male Long-Evans rats is associative and not affected by the number or duration of extinction sessions that we examined. We then evaluate c-Fos expression and histone acetylation (H4K8) in the hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. We find that in general, initial conditioning has a stronger impact on c-Fos expression and acetylation than does reconditioning after extinction. We discuss implications of these results for theories of extinction and the neurobiology of conditioning and extinction.

One way that drugs of abuse perturb the dopamine system is by triggering large amounts of extracellular dopamine to efflux into limbic regions. The basolateral (BLA) and central (CeA) nuclei of the amygdala have been shown to play distinct roles in value representation of primary and conditioned reward. However, the precise role of dopaminergic receptors in the BLA and the CeA during reward-related behaviors remains to be determined. Here we investigate the effects of dopamine D1 receptor blockade in the BLA and the CeA during asymptotic performance of cocaine self-administration and in a novel application of contextual renewal under continued access conditions. After more than three weeks of chained seek-take self-administration of cocaine, male Long Evans rats were given a bilateral intra-BLA or intra-CeA infusion of the D1 antagonist SCH-23390 (2 µg/0.3 µl) for multiple days. Intra-BLA D1 receptor blockade before, but not after the self-administration session, gradually suppressed drug seeking and taking responses and persisted with a change in context with continued D1 blockade. In contrast, intra-CeA D1 receptor blockade caused a rapid reduction in self-administration that showed renewal with a change in context with continued D1 blockade. Further, conditioned place aversion developed with intra-BLA but not intra-CeA infusions. Collectively, these results demonstrate that dopamine D1 receptors in the BLA and CeA both contribute to drug seeking and taking, but may do so through distinct mechanisms.