Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent central nervous system diseases imposing a high social burden to our society. Emotional processing is particularly controlled by GABA-ergic transmission in the amygdala. Using in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry we now investigated changes in the expression of GABA synthesizing enzymes (GAD65 and GAD67), GABA(A) (α1-5, β1-3, γ1-2) and GABA(B) ...

The amygdala has been implicated in processing information about the emotional significance of the environment and in the expression of emotions, through robust pathways with prefrontal, anterior temporal areas, and central autonomic structures. We investigated the anatomic organization and intersection of these pathways in the amygdala in rhesus monkeys with the aid of bidirectional, retrograd...

AGGLETON, J. P., M. PETRIDES AND S. D. IVERSEN. Differential effects ofamygdaloid lesions on conditioned taste aversion learning by rats. PHYSIOL. BEHAV. 27(3) 397-400, 1981.--Rats with electrolytic lesions placed in either the basolateral or corticomedial divisions of the amygdala acquired a conditioned taste aversion to sucrose. Comparisons with a surgical control group indicated that damage ...

Exposure to an acute stressful event facilitates classical eye-blink conditioning in the male rat. The facilitation persists for days after the stressor and its induction is prevented by antagonism of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) type of glutamate receptor. To determine whether NMDA receptor antagonists prevent the facilitated conditioning by activity in the amygdala, a competitive antagonis...

Activity-dependent changes in synaptic efficacy are thought to be the key cellular mechanism for the formation and storage of both explicit and implicit memory. Different patterns of stimulation can elicit different changes in the efficiency on excitatory synaptic transmission. Here, we examined the synaptic changes in the amygdala of adult mice produced by low-frequency stimulation (1 Hz, 15 m...

Slow oscillations (<1 Hz) in neural activity occur during sleep and quiet wakefulness in both animals and humans. Here we show that in urethan-anesthetized animals, neurons in the basolateral amygdala in vivo display a slow oscillation between resting membrane potential (down-state) and depolarized potentials (up-states) occurring at a frequency of approximately 0.3 Hz. This oscillation is inse...

2 Summary In this chapter, we review data from appetitive conditioning studies using measures of pavlovian approach behaviour and of the effects of pavlovian conditioned stimuli on instrumental behaviour, including the pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer effect and conditioned reinforcement. These studies consistently demonstrate double dissociations of function between the basolateral area and ...

Initially reported in dopamine neurons, neural correlates of prediction errors have now been shown in a variety of areas, including orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum, and amygdala. Yet changes in neural activity to an outcome or cues that precede it can reflect other processes. We review the recent literature and show that although activity in dopamine neurons appears to signal prediction ...

There is evidence for neurodevelopment disturbances in schizophrenia. In rats, a neonatal basolateral amygdala lesion induces behavioural features in adults reminiscent of the symptomatology of schizophrenia. Dopamine plays a key role in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, and cannabis use has been implicated in the risk for developing schizophrenia. The effects of an excitotoxic, bilateral baso...

Large concentrations of the beta-amino acid, taurine, can be found in many forebrain areas such as the basolateral amygdala, a portion of the limbic forebrain intimately associated with the regulation of fear/anxiety-like behaviors. In addition to its cytoprotective and osmoregulatory roles, taurine may also serve as an agonist at GABA(A)- and strychnine-sensitive glycine receptors. In this lat...