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The Journal of Neuroscience, August 19, 2009, 29(33):10357-10361; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2119-09.2009

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Brief Communications
The Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis Mediates Inter-individual Variations in Anxiety and Fear

Sevil Duvarci, ^* Elizabeth P. Bauer, ^* and Denis Paré

Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey 07102

Correspondence should be addressed to Denis Paré, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 197 University Avenue, Newark, NJ 07102. Email: pare{at}androemda.rutgers.edu

While learning to fear stimuli that predict danger promotes survival, the inability to inhibit fear to inappropriate cues leads to a pernicious cycle of avoidance behaviors. Previous studies have revealed large inter-individual variations in fear responding with clinically anxious humans exhibiting a tendency to generalize learned fear to safe stimuli or situations. To shed light on the origin of these inter-individual variations, we subjected rats to a differential auditory fear conditioning paradigm in which one conditioned auditory stimulus (CS+) was paired to footshocks whereas a second (CS–) was not. We compared the behavior of rats that received pretraining excitotoxic lesions of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) to that of sham rats. Sham rats exhibit a continuum of anxious/fearful behaviors. At one end of the continuum were rats that displayed a poor ability to discriminate between the CS+ and CS–, high contextual freezing, and an anxiety-like trait in the elevated plus maze (EPM). At the other end were rats that display less fear generalization to the CS–, lower freezing to context, and a nonanxious trait in the EPM. Although BNST-lesioned rats acquired similarly high levels of conditioned fear to the CS+, they froze less than sham rats to the CS–. In fact, BNST-lesioned rats behaved like sham rats with high discriminative abilities in that they exhibited low contextual fear and a nonanxious phenotype in the EPM. Overall, this suggests that inter-individual variations in fear generalization and anxiety phenotype are determined by BNST influences on the amygdala and/or its targets.

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Received May 5, 2009; revised July 7, 2009; accepted July 17, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Denis Paré, Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 197 University Avenue, Newark, NJ 07102. Email: pare{at}androemda.rutgers.edu

Related articles in J. Neurosci.:

The Role of the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis in Learning to Fear

Anna K. Radke
J. Neurosci. 2009 29: 15351-15352. [Full Text]  

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. K. Radke The Role of the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis in Learning to Fear J. Neurosci., December 9, 2009; 29(49): 15351 - 15352. [Full Text] [PDF]

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