Emotional Plasticity

Abstract

Pavlovian fear conditioning has emerged as a leading behavioral paradigm to study emotion systems in the brain. In this chapter, we first provide a brief historical survey of efforts to pinpoint emotional circuits in the brain. We then review what has been learned about fear conditioning circuitry at the systems, cellular, and biochemical/molecular levels, primarily in rodents. We then discuss how this knowledge has been applied to the fear system of the human brain.