Lindsay R Halladay- PhD
- Professor (Assistant) at University of Arizona
Lindsay R Halladay
- PhD
- Professor (Assistant) at University of Arizona
About
46
Publications
9,347
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1,243
Citations
Introduction
My lab focuses on understanding how neural circuits that mediate reward and aversion overlap and interact. More info at Halladay-lab.org
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - September 2024
October 2013 - August 2017
July 2007 - September 2013
Education
September 2007 - March 2013
Publications
Publications (46)
Nearly one percent of children in the US experience childhood neglect or abuse, which can incite lifelong emotional and behavioral disorders. Many studies investigating the neural underpinnings of maleffects inflicted by early life stress have largely focused on dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Newer veins of evidence...
Background:
A clinical hallmark of alcohol use disorder is persistent drinking despite potential adverse consequences. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) are positioned to exert top-down control over subcortical regions, such as the nucleus accumbens shell (NAcS) and basolateral amygdala, which enc...
Trauma during critical periods of development can induce long‐lasting adverse effects. To study neural aberrations resulting from early life stress (ELS), many studies utilize rodent maternal separation, whereby pups are intermittently deprived of maternal care necessary for proper development. This can produce adulthood behavioral deficits related...
While results from many past studies have implicated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in mediating the expression of sustained negative affect, recent studies have highlighted a more complex role for BNST that includes aspects of fear learning in addition to defensive responding. As BNST is thought to encode ambiguous or unpredictable...
Understanding how genetic variability shapes responses to environmental and developmental factors is critical for advancing translational neuroscience. However, most preclinical studies rely on inbred mouse strains that do not capture the genetic complexity of human populations. One key area of translational research focuses on identifying the neur...
The cover image is based on the Original Article Nature and nurture: Comparing mouse behavior in classic versus revised anxiety‐like and social behavioral assays in genetically or environmentally defined groups by Janet Ronquillo et al., https://doi.org/10.1111/gbb.12869 . image
Widely used rodent anxiety assays like the elevated plus maze (EPM) and the open field test (OFT) are conflated with rodents' natural preference for dark over light environments or protected over open spaces. The EPM and OFT have been used for decades but are often criticized by behavioral scientists. Years ago, two revised anxiety assays were desi...
The timing and specificity of oligodendrocyte myelination during development, as well as remyelination after injury or immune attack, remain poorly understood. Recent work has shown that oligodendrocyte progenitors receive synapses from neurons, providing a potential mechanism for neuronal-glial communication. In this study, we investigated the imp...
Widely used rodent anxiety assays like the elevated plus maze (EPM) and the open field test (OFT) are often conflated with natural preference for dark over light environments or protected over open spaces. The EPM and OFT have been used for many decades, yet have also been criticized by generations of behavioral scientists. Several years ago, two r...
Published in the Neuroscience section Behavioral neuroscience has long relied on in vivo electrophysiology to provide spatially and temporally precise answers to complex questions about the neural dynamics underlying sensory processing and action execution. Investigating the neural correlates of behavior can be challenging in freely behaving animal...
Nearly one percent of children in the US experience childhood neglect or abuse, which can incite lifelong emotional and behavioral disorders. Many studies investigating the neural underpinnings of maleffects inflicted by early life stress have largely focused on dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Newer veins of evidence...
The mechanisms that drive the timing and specificity of oligodendrocyte myelination during development, or remyelination after injury or immune attack are not well understood. Recent work has shown that oligodendrocyte progenitors receive synapses from neurons, providing a potential mechanism for neuronal-glial communication. We hypothesize that th...
The risk of an aversive consequence occurring as the result of a reward‐seeking action can have a profound effect on subsequent behavior. Such aversive events can be described as punishers, as they decrease the probability that the same action will be produced again in the future and increase the exploration of less risky alternatives. Punishment c...
Early life stress can induce lifelong emotional and social behavioral deficits that may in some cases be alleviated by drugs or alcohol. A model for early life stress, rodent maternal separation, recapitulates these behavioral sequelae, which are not limited to potentiated anxiety-like behavior, attenuated social motivation, and altered reward-seek...
In many cases of trauma, the same environmental stimuli that become associated with aversive events are experienced on other occasions without adverse consequence. We examined neural circuits underlying partially reinforced fear (PRF), whereby mice received tone-shock pairings on half of conditioning trials. Tone-elicited freezing was lower after P...
While results from many past studies have implicated the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) in mediating the expression of sustained negative affect, recent studies have highlighted a more complex role for BNST that includes aspects of fear learning in addition to defensive responding. As BNST is thought to encode ambiguous or unpredictable...
As we navigate the world around us, sometimes we are faced with danger. Our brains help keep us safe from harm, but we do not fully understand how they do this. How do our brains decide to make us freeze in place when we hear bees buzzing, so that they ignore us and buzz on by? And when those bees are angry, how do our brains decide that running aw...
Recent years have seen advances in our understanding of the neural circuits associated with trauma-related disorders, and the development of relevant assays for these behaviors in rodents. Although inherited factors are known to influence individual differences in risk for these disorders, it has been difficult to identify specific genes that moder...
Food palatability is one of many factors that drives food consumption, and the hedonic drive to feed is a key contributor to obesity and binge eating. In this study, we identified a population of prepronociceptin-expressing cells in the central amygdala (PnocCeA) that are activated by palatable food consumption. Ablation or chemogenetic inhibition...
Determining the neural factors contributing to compulsive behaviors such as alcohol-use disorders (AUDs) has become a significant focus of current preclinical research. Comparison of phenotypic differences across genetically distinct mouse strains provides one approach to identify molecular and genetic factors contributing to compulsive-like behavi...
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Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine; 5-HT) is a neurotransmitter that has an essential role in the regulation of emotion. The precise circuits through which aversive states are orchestrated by 5-HT, however, have not yet been defined. Here we show that 5-HT from the dorsal raphe nucleus (5-HTDRN) enhances fear and anxiety and activates a subpo...
Unlabelled:
Trauma- and stress-related disorders are clinically heterogeneous and associated with substantial genetic risk. Understanding the biological origins of heterogeneity of key intermediate phenotypes such as cognition and emotion can provide novel mechanistic insights into disorder pathogenesis. Performing quantitative genetics in animal...
ELife digest
People may experience a stressful or traumatic event that can cause anxiety in their day-to-day lives. For some people, this anxiety can persist and develop into a disorder, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or acute stress disorder. Millions of people worldwide suffer from these disorders, but there are few classes of drug...
The infralimbic (IL) subregion of prefrontal cortex is broadly involved in behavioral flexibility, risk assessment, and outcome reinforcement. In aversive conditioning tasks, IL has been implicated in fear extinction, and in mediating transitions between Pavlovian versus instrumental responses. Here, we examined the role of IL in mediating transiti...
Impairments in fear extinction are thought to be central to the psychopathology of posttraumatic stress disorder, and
endocannabinoid (eCB) signaling has been strongly implicated in extinction learning. Here we utilized the monoacylglycerol lipase
inhibitor JZL184 to selectively augment brain 2-AG levels combined with an auditory cue fear-condition...
Neural circuits controlling defensive behavior were investigated by recording single units in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and dorsolateral periaqueductal gray (dlPAG) while rats expressed conditioned fear responses to an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS; 20 s train of white noise pips) previously paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus...
Anxiety disorders are often treated using extinction-based exposure therapy, but relapse is common and can occur as a result of reinstatement, whereby an aversive "trigger" can reinstate extinguished fear. Animal models of reinstatement commonly utilize a Pavlovian fear conditioning procedure, in which subjects are first trained to fear a condition...
Here we examined how mu-opioid receptor signaling in the periaqueductal gray (PAG) mediates conditional and unconditional responses to aversive stimuli. The mu-opioid agonist morphine (MOR) and/or the partially mu-selective antagonist naltrexone (NAL) were infused into dorsolateral PAG (dlPAG) during a fear conditioning task, in which rats were tra...
Rats were trained to fear an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) by pairing it with a mild electric shock (the unconditioned stimulus, or US) delivered to one eyelid. After training, the CS elicited two different conditioned fear responses from rats: a passive freezing response, and an active turning response. The balance between these two modes of...
Many previous investigations have relied on entries in encyclopedias or similar sources (e.g., Who's Who) to quantify eminence and achievement. The premises in these earlier studies have been that eminence is a function of reputation and that reputation is accurately captured by encyclopedias and the like. In this article, the authors examine reput...
We previously showed that when rats were trained to fear an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) by pairing it with a mild unilateral shock to the eyelid (the unconditioned stimulus, or US), conditioned freezing depended upon the amygdala contralateral but not ipsilateral from the US. It was proposed that convergent activation of amygdala neurons by...
The goal of this study was to determine if the exaggerated morphine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP) response seen in adult rats after preweanling methylphenidate exposure is unique to reward-mediated behaviors or is indicative of generalized changes in opioid-mediated behaviors. Rats were exposed to saline or methylphenidate (2.0 or 5.0...
Stimulation of kappa-opioid receptors in the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNPR) increases the locomotor activity of young rats: an effect blocked by systemic administration of a D2-like receptor agonist. Based on these initial findings, we proposed that: (a) D2-like receptors in the dorsal striatum are responsible for attenuating kappa-opioid-...
Adult rats typically exhibit more robust behavioral sensitization than do preweanling rats. A possible explanation for this age-dependent difference is that environmental context may have relatively less impact on the psychostimulant-induced behaviors of preweanling rats.
The purpose of this study was to assess the importance of environmental conte...
Questions
Questions (2)
I'm in no way an expert when it comes to mouse ultra sonic vocalization. Does anyone know of any open source (or otherwise) software that is specific for USV analysis?
I've been purchasing the same fixed electrode arrays for years now, and while they are decent quality, they are simply too expensive for what I'm getting (and take 4-6mo to arrive once ordered, which is completely unacceptable IMO). So I'm weighing my options, and although I'm open to making my own, this certainly has its drawbacks. So, does anyone have any recommendations of companies (or groups of people who will take my money!) who manufacture electrode arrays for in vivo ephys (single unit)? I'm flexible as far as fixed vs drive, electrode vs tetrode. Essentially I need something that can record 16 or 32 channels in vivo. I know of the big companies already, looking for names I may not be aware of already.
