Prefrontal control of fear: more than just extinction

By Francisco Sotres-Bayon, Gregory J. Quirk. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2010

602 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While fear research has largely focused on the amygdala, recent findings highlight cortical control of the amygdala in the service of fear regulation. In rodent models, it is becoming well established that the infralimbic prefrontal cortex (IL) plays a key role in extinction learning, and recent findings are uncovering molecular mechanisms involved in extinction-related plasticity. Furthermore, mounting evidence implicates the prelimbic prefrontal cortex (PL) in the production of fear responses. Both IL and PL integrate inputs from the amygdala, as well as other structures to gate the expression of fear via projections to inhibitory or excitatory circuits within the amygdala. We suggest that dual control of the amygdala by separate prefrontal modules increases the flexibility of an organism's response to danger cues.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17dd93cb588c1de811ba1ade2cbf7691a3d0da8b

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Citations in the corpus

AMYGDALA MICROCIRCUITS CONTROLLING LEARNED FEAR (2014, background): “Whereas PL supports fear expression (see above), IL is implicated in extinction (Sotres-Bayon and Quirk, 2010).”
What Can Ethobehavioral Studies Tell Us About The Brain’s Fear System? (2016, background): “A perplexing question that needs to be addressed is how inhibition/suppression of either the BLA or CEA (or even PL [40] or cerebellum [41]) alone effectively blocks auditory fear conditioning when other regions’ functions are presumably intact (Box 1).”
Fear Extinction as a Model for Translational Neuroscience: Ten Years of Progress (2012, background): “Thus, the prefrontal cortex is not simply an inhibitor, but is able to exert dual control over fear expression via separate modules, each with access to separate sets of inputs and outputs (Sotres-Bayon & Quirk 2010).”