Essential oil fragrances positively affect menopausal depressive and anxiety symptoms: An EEG study for mid-life women

摘要

Does Pavlovian conditioning occur in a realistic environment? Contemporary models of fear and their putative translational significance largely stem from rodent Pavlovian fear conditioning research, which simplifies behavioral, systems, circuit and genetic analyses of the acquisition, expression, generalization, extinction, and return of a specific fear CR (e.g., freezing). Although fear conditioning is widely held to be crucial for survival, its func- tions surprisingly have yet to be ethologically validated. Some have also questioned its evolutionary relevance—if associative trial- and-error learning were the primary defensive mechanism, most animals would be killed before they learned which predators and situations must be avoided (e.g., Bolles, 1970). To address this crit- ical gap in the proof of concept, we incorporated a one-trial delay auditory fear conditioning procedure into an ethologically-relevant ‘approach food-avoid predator’ foraging scenario, where male and female rats were presented with a tone CS that preceded either a looming owl US or a dorsal bodyshock US or both USs. Animals that encountered the owl and bodyshock subsequently displayed a higher fear response to the tone stimulus than those presented with a tone-shock pairing, suggesting that auditory fear conditioning may not occur readily in a naturalistic environment. Implement- ing fear conditioning during prey-predator interactions provides a new avenue in understanding how the brain process fearful situa- tions in humans because it realistically simulates (unlike standard fear conditioning) physical/psychological trauma associated with assault, rape, and combat where there are discernable assailants.