Chloe Hegoburu, Yan Tang, Ruifang Niu, Supriya Ghosh, Rodrigo Triana Del Rio, Isabel de Araujo Salgado, Marios Abatis, David Alexandre Mota Caseiro, Erwin H van den Burg, Christophe Grundschober, Ron Stoop
The presence of a companion can reduce fear, but the neural mechanisms underlying this social buffering of fear are incompletely known. We studied social buffering of fear in male and female, and its encoding in the amygdala of male, auditory fear-conditioned rats. Pharmacological, opto,- and/or chemogenetic interventions showed that oxytocin signaling from hypothalamus-to-central amygdala projections underlied fear reduction acutely with a companion and social buffering retention 24 h later without a companion...
March 7, 2024: Nature Communications