Publications
The central question that the lab has tackled is how brain circuits appropriately distinguish between danger and safety. Further, we want to understand what goes wrong in individuals who overgeneralize their fear, reacting defensively to safe situations, leading to distress and missing out on positive activities. This work builds upon the prior work of Dr. Stujenske. As a PhD student, he identified oscillatory brain states that were associated with the appropriate suppression of defensive behavior, and disturbance of this oscillatory pattern was associated with inappropriate overgeneralization of fear. As a postdoc, he expanded on this work, demonstrating that appropriate discrimination of fear relies upon the recruitment of a specific class of inhibitory cells in the basolateral amygdala by the medial prefrontal cortex.
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