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Fear, the emotional and physiologic response to threat, is a core feature of many psychiatric disorders. These authors comprehensively reviewed animal studies of auditory fear conditioning to illustrate the molecular mechanisms by which memories of a fearful experience become consolidated and the ways in which they might be disrupted.
In auditory fear conditioning, a sound (conditioned stimulus; CS) is paired with a shock (unconditioned stimulus; UCS), resulting in the CS eliciting a fear response (e.g., freezing in mice). Acquisition of fear memory involves associative plasticity. In this process, a synaptic input is strengthened when a weak presynaptic input to the amygdala and a strong postsynaptic input coincide, allowing the CS to evoke…