background: dental anxiety and fear are major complications for both patient and dental care provider. the purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of dental anxiety and fear in patients who referred to isfahan dental school and their relation to their age, gender, educational level, past traumatic experiences and frequency of dental visits. materials and methods: in this cross-sectio...

The relation between dental, blood and injection fear and oral health was examined in 936 New Zealand 18-year-olds. Of the approximately ten percent (n = 96) of the sample who reported a dental fear, 1 in 10 also reported a fear of blood and 53% a co-morbid fear of injections. Study members with dental fear alone or co-morbid dental and blood or injection fear had significantly worse oral healt...

Although disrupting reconsolidation may be a promising approach to attenuate or erase the expression of fear memory, it is not clear how the neural state following fear reminder contribute to the following fear extinction. To address this question, we used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to measure spontaneous neuronal activity and functional connectivity (RSFC) fo...

Fear of childbirth is an important and prevalent problem during pregnancy and delivery. Self-efficacy of childbirth is one of the factors playing an important role in the fear of delivery. This study aimed to determine the relationship between the fear and self-efficacy of childbirth during labor in primipara women. This descriptive and analytical study was conducted on 100 primipara women in O...

Conditioned fear plays a key role in anxiety disorders as well as depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions. Understanding how neuromodulators drive the associated learning and memory processes, including memory consolidation, retrieval/expression, and extinction (recall), is essential in the understanding of (individual differences in vulnerability to) these disorders and their treatmen...

In three experiments, chronic stress enhancement of subsequent fear learning was investigated in C57Bl/6 mice. The first experiment focused on the influence of stressor type on subsequent Pavlovian fear learning. Male mice were subjected to 7 d of either repeated restraint stress or chronic variable stress before undergoing a fear conditioning procedure with three tone-shock trials. Subsequent ...

Astrocytes are well known to scale synaptic structural and functional plasticity, while the role in learning and memory, such as conditioned fear memory, is poorly elucidated. Here, using pharmacological approach, we find that fluorocitrate (FC) significantly inhibits the acquisition of fear memory, suggesting that astrocyte activity is required for fear memory formation. We further demonstrate...