Emotion articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The central amygdala inhibitory microcircuits mediate fear extinction by reversible, stimulus- and context-specific changes in neuronal responses. These alterations are absent when extinction is deficient and selective silencing of PKCδ neurons impairs fear extinction.

    • Nigel Whittle
    • , Jonathan Fadok
    •  & Stéphane Ciocchi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Acute stress transiently disrupts reward-seeking behaviour and repeated stress exposure produces lasting anhedonia-like behaviour in rodents. Here, the authors show that stress triggers GABAergic activity in the ventral tegmental area which blunts reward-seeking behaviour in mice.

    • Daniel C. Lowes
    • , Linda A. Chamberlin
    •  & Alexander Z. Harris

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Aggression in females is understudied in model organisms. Here, the authors establish a model of enhanced aggression in virgin female rats and show that oxytocin and vasopressin systems differentially modulate aggression in distinct neuronal populations of the lateral septum of female rats.

    • Vinícius Elias de Moura Oliveira
    • , Michael Lukas
    •  & Inga D. Neumann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Innate and learned fear can induce rapid changes in body temperature of mammals. The authors identify the posterior subthalamic nucleus as a major thermoregulatory hub that connects the external lateral parabrachial subnucleus to the nucleus of the solitary tract to mediate fear-evoked hypothermia.

    • Can Liu
    • , Chia-Ying Lee
    •  & Qinghua Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Combining optogenetics, behavioral modelling and neural population analysis, the authors show in mice that during fear-related freezing the olfactory bulb transmits 4 Hz breathing rhythm to the prefrontal cortex where this oscillation organizes local activity and regulates freezing episode duration.

    • Sophie Bagur
    • , Julie M. Lefort
    •  & Karim Benchenane

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Tachykinin 2 (Tac2) pathway in the central amygdala is sufficient and necessary for modulating fear memory consolidation. The authors show that silencing Tac2 neurons in the amygdala of male mice reduces fear expression, while fear expression in female mice is increased when manipulations are made during proestrus.

    • A. Florido
    • , E. R. Velasco
    •  & R. Andero

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How thalamic sensory relays participate in plasticity upon associative fear learning and stable long-term sensory coding remains unknown. The authors show that auditory thalamus neurons exhibit heterogeneous plasticity patterns after learning while population level encoding of auditory stimuli remains stable across days.

    • James Alexander Taylor
    • , Masashi Hasegawa
    •  & Jan Gründemann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Endocannabinoid levels are controlled by the fine balance between their synthesis and degradation. Here, the authors show that memory formation through fear conditioning selectively accelerates the degradation of endocannabinoids in the cerebellum via a lasting increase in GABA release.

    • Christophe J. Dubois
    • , Jessica Fawcett-Patel
    •  & Siqiong June Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Alexander et al. causally implicate over-activity in primate subgenual cingulate in affective and cardiovascular dysfunction relevant to anxiety and depression. Over-activation led to elevated activity in a stress-related network whilst decreasing activity in higher-order prefrontal cognitive regions.

    • Laith Alexander
    • , Christian M. Wood
    •  & Angela C. Roberts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Chronic stress is a risk factor for mood disorders, yet the molecular and circuit mechanisms of stress-induced changes are not well understood. Here, the authors report the role of the transcription factor ΔFosB in driving activity changes in response to stress in glutamatergic neurons in the ventral hippocampus that project to nucleus accumben.

    • Andrew L. Eagle
    • , Claire E. Manning
    •  & Alfred J. Robison

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is controversy about whether placebos without deception cause real psychobiological benefits. Here, the authors show that the positive effects of placebos without deception are more than response bias by providing evidence they can reduce self-report and neural measures of emotional distress.

    • Darwin A. Guevarra
    • , Jason S. Moser
    •  & Ethan Kross

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The vCA1-BA projection is enriched in shock responsive neurons, which are necessary for fear memory encoding and become correlated with a network of neurons during retrieval. Here the authors show that the magnitude of vCA1 correlated activity is proportional to memory strength and requires the shock response during encoding.

    • Jessica C. Jimenez
    • , Jack E. Berry
    •  & Rene Hen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although the feeling of being stressed is ubiquitous and clinically significant, the underlying neural mechanisms are unclear. Using a novel predictive modeling approach, the authors show that functional hippocampal networks specifically and consistently predict the feeling of stress.

    • Elizabeth V. Goldfarb
    • , Monica D. Rosenberg
    •  & Rajita Sinha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Depression is correlated with many brain-related traits. Here, Shen et al. perform phenome-wide association studies of a depression polygenic risk score (PRS) and find associations with 51 behavioural and 26 neuroimaging traits which are further followed up on using Mendelian randomization and mediation analyses.

    • Xueyi Shen
    • , David M. Howard
    •  & Andrew M. McIntosh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People can experience a wide variety of emotions, and how the brain represents these varying affective states is a matter of debate. Here the authors show that coding mechanisms of emotions in right temporo-parietal cortex resemble those of low-level stimulus features in primary sensory regions.

    • Giada Lettieri
    • , Giacomo Handjaras
    •  & Luca Cecchetti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The precise role of the thalamic reticular nucleus in fear is not understood. Here, the authors report that the rostroventral part of the reticular nucleus is involved in the extinction of tone conditioned fear memory through its inhibitory projections to the dorsal midline thalamus.

    • Joon-Hyuk Lee
    • , Charles-Francois V. Latchoumane
    •  & Hee-Sup Shin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Performance anxiety can impair motor skill, and even affect expert athletes and musicians. Here, the authors show that anxiety affects performance at the ‘junction’ between two well-learned action sequences, and that this affect is associated with activity in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC).

    • Gowrishankar Ganesh
    • , Takehiro Minamoto
    •  & Masahiko Haruno

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When injured, fish release an alarm substance produced by club cells in the skin that elicits fear in members of their shoal. Here, the authors show that mucus and bacteria are transported from the external surface into club cells, and bacterial components elicit alarm behaviour, acting in concert with a substance from fish.

    • Joanne Shu Ming Chia
    • , Elena S. Wall
    •  & Suresh Jesuthasan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Certain sounds are especially attention-grabbing and often unpleasant as well. Here, the authors show that fast but perceptible amplitude modulations in the ‘roughness range' (30–150 Hz) are temporally salient and synchronise not just brain auditory networks but also salience-related networks.

    • Luc H. Arnal
    • , Andreas Kleinschmidt
    •  & Pierre Mégevand

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain can represent the mental states of others, as well as those of the self. Here, the authors show that social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one's own states, compared to those of others, suggesting that we represent our own mind with greater granularity.

    • Mark A. Thornton
    • , Miriam E. Weaverdyck
    •  & Diana I. Tamir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    During learning of an association between a neutral cue and an aversive stimulus, there is a time lag between trials. Here, the authors examine how long inter-trial intervals are represented by the basolateral amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex to support learning rate and memory strength.

    • Aryeh H. Taub
    • , Yosef Shohat
    •  & Rony Paz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fear memories are overcome only when it is ascertained that fearful responses are not appropriate. Here the authors demonstrate that activity in dopamine neurons is necessary to extinguish fear responses and two distinct dopamine neuron projections exert opposing effects on extinction learning.

    • Ray Luo
    • , Akira Uematsu
    •  & Joshua P. Johansen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Fluctuations in mood are known to affect our decisions. Here the authors propose and validate a model of how mood fluctuations arise through a slow integration of positive and negative feedback and report the resulting key changes in brain activity that modulate our decision making.

    • Fabien Vinckier
    • , Lionel Rigoux
    •  & Mathias Pessiglione

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When perceiving new stimuli, organisms need to distinguish between threats versus harmless stimuli. Here, the authors find a set of cells in the lateral amygdala that is required to discriminate or generalize new auditory stimuli based on similarity to previously fear-associate sounds.

    • Anna Grosso
    • , Giulia Santoni
    •  & Benedetto Sacchetti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Oxytocin modulates social behaviours in mammals. Here the authors demonstrate that observational fear, a measure of empathy-like behaviour in rodents, is modulated by oxytocin.

    • Marc T. Pisansky
    • , Leah R. Hanson
    •  & Jonathan C. Gewirtz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Vigilance involves the activation of orexinergic neurons in the lateral hypothalamus (LH-ox). Here the authors report the functional role of a monosynaptically connected circuit with orexinergic neurons connected to noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus which target lateral amygdala neurons and enhance fear expression and generalization.

    • Shingo Soya
    • , Tohru M. Takahashi
    •  & Takeshi Sakurai

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The responses of striatal GABAergic interneurons to thalamic inputs are not well characterised. Here, the authors demonstrate that complex intrastriatal circuitry is responsible for thalamic-evoked monosynaptic and disynaptic excitation in NPY-NGF interneurons but a disynaptic inhibition in the NPY-PLTS.

    • Maxime Assous
    • , Jaime Kaminer
    •  & James M. Tepper

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though humans often learn about negative outcomes from observing the response of others, the neurochemistry underlying this learning is unknown. Here, authors show that blocking opioid receptors enhances social threat learning and describe the brain regions underlying this effect.

    • Jan Haaker
    • , Jonathan Yi
    •  & Andreas Olsson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding inter-individual differences in stress-susceptibility could lead to novel treatments and preventative strategies for stress-related pathologies. Here the authors provide evidence that increased endocannabinoid signalling is a resilience factor that buffers against adverse consequences of stress.

    • Rebecca J. Bluett
    • , Rita Báldi
    •  & Sachin Patel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is known to modulate anxiety-related behaviours. Here the authors show that excitatory inputs from infralimbic cortex and ventral subiculum/CA1 converge onto the same BNST neurons; stimulation of vSUB/CA1 triggers LTP in BNST and reduces anxiety in rats.

    • Christelle Glangetas
    • , Léma Massi
    •  & François Georges

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Amygdala and hippocampus are involved in processing motivationally salient stimuli but the precise circuit dynamics of the interaction is not understood. Here the authors show that in response to fearful faces in humans, theta/alpha oscillations in the amygdala modulate hippocampal activity dynamics.

    • Jie Zheng
    • , Kristopher L. Anderson
    •  & Jack J. Lin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Black individuals are racially stereotyped as threatening but how bodily signals may affect these misperceptions is not known. Here Azevedo and colleagues show that these race-driven responses are affected by the cardiac cycle, being more biased when arterial baroreceptor activation is maximal.

    • Ruben T. Azevedo
    • , Sarah N. Garfinkel
    •  & Manos Tsakiris

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