Topic: Safety learning

Safety learning allows the identification of non-threatening situations, a learning process instrumental for survival and psychic health. In contrast to fear learning, in which a sensory cue (conditioned stimulus, CS) is temporally linked with a mildly aversive stimulus (US), safety learning can be studied by presenting the CS and US in an explicitly unpaired fashion during training. This should result in reduced contextual freezing when the learned CS is presented alone in a recall session within the same context. Here, we studied the effects of auditory stimuli on freezing responses in mice.

Exposure-based therapies can be highly effective for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but up to one third of patients do not respond adequately. Repeated exposure to fear-evoking cues is hypothesized to suppress fear responses through the acquisition and recall of new safety learning in a process termed fear extinction. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has gained interest as a non-invasive neuromodulation technique that may suppress fear expression or augment fear extinction. We previously established that in mice, repeated anodal tDCS applied over the prefront