Fear Conditioning Theory

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Pharmacological and Anatomical Analysis of Fear Conditioning Based On Drug Addiction This article discussed about the fear–potentiated startle paradigm, neuroanatomical analysis of fear conditioning benefits, role of amygdala in fear-potentiated startle and its possible connections to the startle pathway and critical visual structures that carry information about the conditioned stimulus. The fear-potentiated startle paradigm can be demonstrated by presenting the eliciting auditory startle stimulus in the resent of cue such as light and paired with a shock (Brown et al., 1951; Davis, 1986). This test referred as conditioned response / fear (Rima, 2006) ; which can defined by increased startle amplitude in the presence of cue paired with…show more content…
However, at the present time, the mechanism how amygdala participates in fear-potentiated startle in not very clear. Pollock et al, 1976 stated that, short latency visual-evoked potentials have been recorded in amygdala (Pollock et al., 1975), electrical stimulation of the amygdala has been reported to produce fear like behaviours in animals (Applegate et al., 1983), to mimic conditioned and unconditioned cardiac effects in rabbit heart-rate conditioning (Kapp et al., 1982) and to elicit feelings of anxiety in humans. Further studies involving stimulation of the area of ventral amygdalogufal pathway in combination with lesions of cell bodies would help clarify whether the enhancement of startle by stimulation are results from activation of the axons originating from these amygdaloid nuclei or not. Besides that, there are no signs of behavioural activation produced by electrical stimulation of the amygdala except for an enhancement of startle at these stimulation of amygdala stimulation. In addition, electrical stimulation of the amygdala alone does not elicit startle, even at high currents. Finally, electrical stimulation of several other nearby brain areas such as the endopiriform nucleus, fundus striati, internal capsule, or some sites in the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala do not increase
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