Topic: motivational behavior

Empathy is vital in interpersonal and societal interactions and serves as an emotional bridge fostering pro-social, including helping behavior. The process of offering help unfolds through distinct stages, starting with empathetic responses to another individual's negative emotional state, progressing to the decision to provide assistance, and culminating in the social rewards that follow such acts. Despite years of research in humans, the neural networks recruited in different stages of prosocial behavior still remain elusive. In this study, we established single photon emission computerized

Neurons of the paraventricular thalamic nucleus (PVT) regulates emotional and motivational behavior via highly collateralized axon arbour innervating several forebrain areas. Maintaining an optimal excitation-inhibition balance is vital for PVT function, yet the sources of glutamatergic and GABAergic inputs are presently unclear. We identified subcortical glutamatergic and GABAergic inputs to the PVT by retrograde viral tracing in vGLUT2-Cre and vGAT-Cre mice, respectively. We found distinct retrogradely labelled cell groups containing purely vGLUT2+positive, purely vGAT+ or mixed neurons thro