Publications related to Fear | EPFL Graph Search

Teaching about non-deterministic physics: an almost forgotten fundamental contribution of Marie Curie

The first historical steps of radioactivity research offer an excellent opportunity to teach a key concept of modern physics: non-deterministic phenomena. However, this opportunity is often wasted because of historical misconceptions and of the irrational ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Blunted Glucocorticoid Responsiveness to Stress Causes Behavioral and Biological Alterations That Lead to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Vulnerability

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, Olivia Zanoletti, Simone Astori, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Sophie Elizabeth Walker, Silvia Monari

Background: Understanding why only a subset of trauma-exposed individuals develop posttraumatic stress disorder is critical for advancing clinical strategies. A few behavioral (deficits in fear extinction) and biological (blunted glucocorticoid levels, sma ...

2023

Prefrontal engrams of long-term fear memory perpetuate pain perception

Johannes Gräff, Yechao Han

A painful episode can lead to a life-long increase in an individual's experience of pain. Fearful anticipation of imminent pain could play a role in this phenomenon, but the neurobiological underpinnings are unclear because fear can both suppress and enhan ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Plasticity of sensory representations in the posterior insular cortex during fear learning

Denys Osypenko

Aversively-motivated associative learning allows animals to avoid harm and thus ensures survival. Aversive learning can be studied by the fear learning paradigm, in which an innocuous sensory stimulus like a tone (conditioned stimulus, CS), acquires a nega ...

EPFL2023

A striatal circuit balances learned fear in the presence and absence of sensory cues

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Michael Kintscher

During fear learning, defensive behaviors like freezing need to be finely balanced in the presence or absence of threat-predicting cues (conditioned stimulus, CS). Nevertheless, the circuits underlying such balancing are largely unknown. Here, we investiga ...

eLIFE SCIENCES PUBL LTD2023

Development of stimuli-responsive chemistry for tumor-targeted immunotherapy

Céline Jasmin Prange

Cancer immunotherapy is the science of boosting the immune response of patients to fight cancer. Recent advances have brought up treatments with huge success in the clinic. Patients with ad-vanced-stage cancers were long-term cured through checkpoint inhib ...

EPFL2023

Genetic selection for low glucocorticoid responsiveness recapitulates PTSD-related phenotypes: a behavioral, neuroimaging and sleep-physiology study

Silvia Monari

Humans show inter-individual differences in vulnerability to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following exposure to trauma. Several critical biobehavioral features have been consistently described in PTSD patients, including blunted cortisol l ...

EPFL2022

An insular cortex - lateral amygdala network in fear learning

Shriya Palchaudhuri

Animals are capable of evaluating sensory cues for possible threats and adapting their behaviours accordingly. Fear learning is an evolutionarily conserved behaviour crucial for animal survival, during which sensory percepts with a negative reinforcing qua ...

EPFL2022

Ecological momentary assessment of emotional processing: An exploratory analysis comparing daily life and a psychotherapy analogue session

Mehdi Gholam, Hélène Beuchat, Loris Grandjean

Background: Emotional processing has been studied in psychotherapy as a state-dependent, sequential process of change. So far, no studies have applied this conceptualisation of emotional processing to the assessments of emotion in daily life. This is parti ...

WILEY2022

Early life adoption shows rearing environment supersedes transgenerational effects of paternal stress on aggressive temperament in the offspring

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Guillaume Poirier, Olivia Zanoletti, Sonakshi Gupta

Prenatal experience and transgenerational influences are increasingly recognized as critical for defining the socio-emotional system, through the development of social competences and of their underlying neural circuitries. Here, we used an established rat ...

2021

A VTA to Basal Amygdala Dopamine Projection Contributes to Signal Salient Somatosensory Events during Fear Learning

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Wei Tang, Michael Kintscher

The amygdala is a brain area critical for the formation of fear memories. However, the nature of the teaching signal(s) that drive plasticity in the amygdala are still under debate. Here, we use optogenetic methods to investigate the contribution of ventra ...

2020

RETRACTED: Insular cortex processes aversive somatosensory information and is crucial for threat learning

Ralf Schneggenburger, Olexiy Kochubey, Wei Tang, Michael Kintscher, Denys Osypenko, Shriya Palchaudhuri, Emmanuelle Marie Brigitte Berret

Learning about threats is essential for survival. During threat learning, an innocuous sensory percept such as a tone acquires an emotional meaning when paired with an aversive stimulus such as a mild footshock. The amygdala is critical for threat memory f ...

American Association for the Advancement of Science2019

Reactivation of Recall-Induced Neurons in the Infralimbic Cortex and the Basolateral Amygdala After Remote Fear Memory Attenuation

Johannes Gräff, Ossama Mohamed Salah El-Dien El-Sayed Ibrahim Khalaf

Whether the attenuation of traumatic memories is mediated through the suppression of the original memory trace of fear by a new memory trace of safety, or through an updating of the original fear trace towards safety has been a long-standing question at th ...

2019

Peripubertal stress-induced heightened aggression: modulation of the glucocorticoid receptor in the central amygdala and normalization by mifepristone treatment

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Jocelin Grosse, Olivia Zanoletti, Stamatina Tzanoulinou, Orbicia Riccio Wicht, Vandana Veenit

Despite the enormous negative impact of excessive aggression for individuals and societies, there is a paucity of treatments. Here, using a peripubertal stress model of heightened aggression in rats, we investigated the involvement of the glucocorticoid sy ...

2019

The dopaminergic VTA - basal amygdala projection contributes to signal aversive state in fear memory

Wei Tang

Dopamine released from midbrain neurons is an important neuromodulatory signal during associative learning in many forebrain circuits. One model of associative learning is auditory cued fear learning, during which an innocuous sensory percept like a tone ( ...

EPFL2018

Long term programming of psychopathology-like behaviors in male rats by peripubertal stress depends on individual’s glucocorticoid responsiveness to stress

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Sophie Elizabeth Walker

Experience of adversity early in life and dysregulation of hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenocortical (HPA) axis activity are risk factors often independently associated with the development of psychopathological disorders, including depression, PTSD and pathol ...

2018

In the pursuit of the fear engram: identification of neuronal circuits underlying the treatment of anxiety disorder

Ossama Mohamed Salah El-Dien El-Sayed Ibrahim Khalaf

Fear and other anxiety disorders are extraordinarily robust and difficult to treat. Among the most effective treatments for anxiety disorders are exposure-based therapies, during which a patient is repeatedly confronted with the originally fear-eliciting s ...

EPFL2017

Constitutive differences in habituation of the glucocorticoid response to stress are related to variation in aggression and anxiety-related behaviors

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Olivia Zanoletti, Marie-Isabelle Guillot de Suduiraut, Sophie Elizabeth Walker

Glucocorticoids coordinate responses that enable an individual to cope with stressful challenges and, additionally, mediate adaptation following cessation of a stressor. There are important individual differences in the magnitude of glucocorticoid responsi ...

2017

Hierarchical status predicts behavioral vulnerability and nucleus accumbens metabolic profile following chronic social defeat stress

Rolf Gruetter, Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Hongxia Lei, Antoine Timothée Cherix, João Pedro de Matos Rodrigues, Thomas Didier Larrieu, Maria Aranzazu Duque Moreno

Extensive data highlight the existence of major differences in individuals’ susceptibility to stress [1; 2; 3 ; 4]. While genetic factors [5 ; 6] and exposure to early life stress [7 ; 8] are key components for such neurobehavioral diversity, intriguing ob ...

2017

Stress, glucocorticoid receptor and social behaviors

Peripuberty, comprising childhood and adolescence, constitutes an important time window in the brain development and maturation. Exposure to prolonged stress during this period has been shown to increase the risk for the development of psychopathologies la ...

EPFL2017