Bryan Schuessler

University of Washington Seattle | UW · Department of Psychology

Pavlovian fear conditioning, which offers the advantage of simplicity in both the control of conditional and unconditional stimuli (CS, US) presentation and the analysis of specific conditional and unconditional responses (CR, UR) in a controlled laboratory setting, has been the standard model in basic and translational fear research. Despite 100 y...

Pavlovian fear conditioning, which offers the advantage of simplicity in both the control of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli (CS, US) presentation and the analysis of specific conditioned and unconditioned responses (CR, UR) in a controlled laboratory setting, has been the standard model in basic and translational fear research. Despite 100 y...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2020.594568.].

Basic research of fear and anxiety in rodents has historically utilized a limited set of behavioral paradigms, for example, Pavlovian (classical) fear conditioning, the elevated plus-maze, or inhibitory (passive) avoidance. These traditional paradigms measure a limited selection of variables over a short duration, providing only a "snapshot" of fea...

Rodents in the wild are under nearly constant threat of aerial predation and thus have evolved adaptive innate defensive behaviors, such as freezing or fleeing, in response to a perceived looming threat. Here we employed an ethologically relevant paradigm to study innate fear of aerial predators in male and female rats during a goal-oriented task....

The scientific understanding of fear and anxiety—in both normal and pathological forms—is presently limited by a predominance of studies that use male animals and Pavlovian fear conditioning-centered paradigms that restrict and assess specific behaviors (e.g., freezing) over brief sampling periods and overlook the broader contributions of the spati...