Journal
BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 121, Issue 3, Pages 501-514Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC/EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING FOUNDATION
DOI: 10.1037/0735-7044.121.3.501
Keywords
extinction; context; yohnubine; renewal; relapse
Categories
Funding
- NIMH NIH HHS [R01 MH64847, R01 MH064847] Funding Source: Medline
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Six experiments with rat subjects examined the effect of yohimbine, an alpha-2 adrenergic autoreceptor antagonist, on the extinction of conditioned fear to a tone. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that systemic administration of yohimbine (1.0 mg/kg) facilitated a long-term decrease in freezing after extinction, and this depended on pairing drug administration with extinction training. However, Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that yohimbine did not eradicate the original fear learning: Freezing was renewed when the tone was tested outside of the extinction context. Experiments 5 and 6 found that the contextually specific attenuation of fear produced by yohimbine transferred to another extinguished conditional stimulus (CS) and not to a nonextinguished CS. The results suggest that yohimbine, when administered in the presence of a neutral context, creates a form of inhibition in that context that allows that specific context to reduce fear of an extinguished CS.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available