Cortisol release in a stressful situation can be beneficial for memory encoding and memory consolidation. Stimuli, such as odors, related to the stressful episode may successfully cue memory contents of the stress experience. The current investigation aimed at testing the potency of stress to influence startle responsivity 24 hr later and to implicitly reactivate emotional memory traces trigger...

AIMS An assessment of the acoustic startle response (ASR) and prepulse inhibition (PPI) of ASR in laboratory animals is used to model human anxiety and psychotic states, respectively. The aim of the study was to evaluate ASR and PPI in alcohol-naive male and female Warsaw alcohol high-preferring (WHP) and Warsaw alcohol low-preferring (WLP) rats. METHODS ASR and PPI were assessed in two separ...

prepulse inhibition (ppi), the objective measure of sensorimotor gating disturbance has being widely used in animal models of schizophrenia. dopaminergic direct and indirect agonists impair ppi. however, the profile of dopaminergic receptors involved in ppi impairment by dopamine agonists is not clear. by injecting shrna expressing plasmids against dopamine d2 receptor genes (drd2) in the nucle...

Behavioral evidence suggests that emotion processing deficits in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may occur at the level of basic (early, rapid, automatic) affective processes. Consistently, neurological evidence indicates that key brain areas associated with basic affective processing are atypical in ASD. The current study sought to better specify these deficits by comparing di...

This report used emotion-modulated startle to refine theoretically critical claims about negative affect during tobacco withdrawal. Forty-eight dependent smokers (assigned to either a 24-hr nicotine withdrawal condition or a continued smoking condition) and 48 nonsmokers participated in this study. Participants viewed a series of neutral and unpleasant photographic images and were instructed to...

A loud acoustic stimulus that elicits a startle reflex has long been used to study the neurophysiology of cortical and subcortical neural circuits. More recent investigations have shown that startle can act as an early trigger for prepared actions, suggesting a brainstem role in the preparation and initiation of actions. However, in order to attribute any startle-triggered voluntary responses t...

The time course of the recovery cycle (refractory period) of the acoustic startle response in rats was determined. The refractory effect was shown to be highly dependent upon the interval between two startle stimuli but independent of the intensity of the stimuli at a given interval, provided that the intensity of both stimuli was the same. A model based on summation of refractory effects to re...

Graphical Abstract Highlights d GCaMP6s enables analysis of subcellular neuronal activity during startle behavior d Startle regulation occurs both up-and downstream of the Mauthner cell d Downstream inhibition does not play a role in short-term habituation d Short-term habituation is due to depression of Mauthner cell dendritic excitability In Brief The neuronal mechanisms that govern short-ter...

BACKGROUND The hypothesis that exaggerated startle in Vietnam veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reflects an anxiogenic response to stressful contexts was tested. METHODS Thirty-four nonmedicated Vietnam veterans with PTSD, and 17 combat and 14 civilian non-PTSD controls participated in two testing sessions over separate days. Acoustic startle stimuli were delivered alone or i...

Aims: An assessment of the acoustic startle response (ASR) and prepulse inhibition (PPI) of ASR in laboratory animals is used to model human anxiety and psychotic states, respectively. The aim of the study was to evaluate ASR and PPI in alcoholnaive male and female Warsaw alcohol high-preferring (WHP) and Warsaw alcohol low-preferring (WLP) rats. Methods: ASR and PPI were assessed in two separa...