Cognitive Neuroscience Society

The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
MENUMENU
  • Home
  • Annual Meeting
        • General Information
          • Accessibility at CNS
          • Code of Conduct
          • Dates and Deadlines
          • Hotel Reservations
          • Poster Printing Discount
          • Annual Meeting Workshop Policy & Application
          • Exhibit with us!
        • Program
          • Schedule Overview
          • Keynote Address
          • George A. Miller Awardee
          • Distinguished Career Contributions Awardee
          • Young Investigator Awardees
          • Invited-Symposium Sessions
          • Symposium Sessions
          • Data Blitz Session Schedule
          • Poster Schedule & Session Information
          • GSA/PFA Award Winners
          • Workshops, Socials & Special Events
        • Registration
          • Registration
          • Registration FAQ
          • Registration Policies, Cancellations & Refunds
        • News/Press
          • CNS 2023 Press Room
          • CNS 2022 Blog
          • CNS 2021 Blog
          • CNS 2020 Blog
        • Submissions
          • 2023 Poster Printing Discount
          • Submission Requirements
          • Submit a Poster
          • Submit a Symposium
          • GSA or PFA Application
          • Data Blitz
          • Frequently Asked Submission Questions
        • Archive
          • CNS 2020 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2019 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2018 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2017 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2016 Conference Videos
          • CNS 2015 Conference Videos
          • Previous Meetings Programs & Abstracts
  • About CNS
    • Boards and Committees
    • CNS Statement: Black Lives Matter
  • Membership
    • Information and Benefits
    • Join or Renew Membership
    • Membership FAQs
    • Member Discounts
    • Newsletter
      • Submit an Announcement
      • Current Newsletter
      • Newsletter FAQs
      • Past Newsletters
  • Awards
    • George A. Miller Award
    • Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award
    • Young Investigator Award
    • Young Investigator Award Nominations
    • 2023 YIA Nomination Form
    • JoCN Travel Fellowship Award
  • News Center
    • CNS Blog
    • CNS 2023 Press Room
    • CNS 2022 Blog
    • CNS 2021 Blog
    • CNS 2020 Blog
    • CNS 2019 Blog
    • Blog Archives
    • Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter
    • Media Contact
  • My CNS
  • Contact Us
post

Threats, Survival, and Fear: Q&A with Joseph LeDoux

October 25, 2012

credit: Toby Ord, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/deed.enWith Halloween around the corner, fear may be on your mind. As a basic emotion, fear develops when we react to an immediate danger.

Understanding exactly how our brains detect and respond to such danger has been a goal of Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University for much of his career. His pioneering work on “fear conditioning,” which he now calls “threat conditioning,” revealed the neurological pathways through which we react to threats.

This Pavlovian-type conditioning uses a neutral stimulus like an auditory tone at the same time as a painful event, and over time, this tone becomes associated with the discomfort and can trigger a fear response in the brain, specifically the amygdala. The neural processing in the amygdala causes chemical processes in the brain cells that lead to our natural defenses in the face of a threat – whether a spider or a robber.

LeDoux’s work has not only contributed to our understanding of these processes but also to ways we can work to overcome pathological fears, including through work on memory and fear. He will be a keynote speaker at the CNS 20th anniversary meeting in San Francisco this April. He talked with CNS about his research and how it has evolved over the past couple decades.

CNS: How did you first become interested in studying fear? Why is it important to you?

LeDoux: I developed an interest in emotion while doing my Ph.D. research on split-brain patients with Mike Gazzaniga in the mid 1970s. I then decided to turn to animal studies as techniques for studying the human brain were pretty limited at the time. I chose a task that I could use to induce an emotion in rats. The task was “fear conditioning.” But I soon concluded that I was not studying “emotion” but instead one emotion, fear.

But the truth is I have always emphasized that I study how the brain detects and responds to danger (threats) rather than how it feels fear. But most people think I work on “fear” in the sense of feelings. I’ve been trying to clear up that confusion lately. We can study threat processing in rats and people alike, but we have no idea what an animal experiences when threatened.

CNS: You delivered a speech at the 1999 CNS annual meeting. Can you tell us about a couple of the most important changes in our knowledge about the brain mechanisms underlying fear since that talk 13 years ago?

LeDoux: There has been a lot of progress on the details of the circuits and cellular and molecular mechanisms. Research on threat conditioning (what we use to call fear conditioning) is now one of the leading areas for which findings in animals can be comfortably applied to humans.

CNS: Can you give us a preview of what you will be discussing in your keynote address at the CNS annual meeting in San Francisco (April 13-16, 2013)?

LeDoux: I’m going to be talking about the relation between emotion and survival and focusing on this reconceptualization. We have certain survival functions that we share with all animals and even unicelluar organisms to some extent. They contribute to emotions but are not emotional functions. Emotion is what happens when we become consciously aware that this stuff is going on in our brain and body. Every animal has survival functions. Some animals have feelings when these occur. Humans do but its hard to say which other animals, if any, do. But not all emotions are based on survival functions.

An important question is what makes certain states all inhabit some psychological world called fear – whether elicited by a snake at your feet, the concern of of not passing an exam, the thought that death awaits some day, or that God will punish bad behavior. I would say that what makes an emotion an emotion is based on various non-emotional ingredients (activities in the brain and body are interpreted as being relevant to our well-being).

CNS: Does your research speak to why people find fun in fear around Halloween time?

LeDoux: Fear or other emotions are conscious experiences and can involve quite a bit of cognitive interpretation of situations. So we can get the body revved up in a horror movie or haunted house and enjoy the rush since we know there is no consequence to it.

CNS: Can you describe 1 or 2 promising lines of therapy being developed now for treating pathological fear?

LeDoux: Research on threat conditioning has led to a number of potential therapies. One is the use of drugs like d-cycloserine to enhance extinction learning. Mike Davis and Kerry Ressler and their colleagues at Emory have pioneered this work.

Another involves the use of manipulations that alter memory after retrieval. My lab has contributed a lot to this, showing the bodily responses elicited by triggers of aversive memory can be blunted by disrupting the re-storage of the memory after retrieval. This is called reconsolidation blockade. It is being tested now as a treatment for traumatic memory. Ideally, it will blunt the responses (behavioral reactions and autonomic and endocrine responses) controlled by implicit memory associations in the amygdala but leave the explicit declarative memory involving the hippocampus and other cortical areas intact.

CNS: What is the next step for your research? What are you working on now?

LeDoux: We do a lot now on how the brain transitions from reaction to action. You can’t stay frozen in the face of a threat forever. You have to act. Just how the brain switches is fascinating and accounts for a lot of the lab’s work now. This too is important for treatment, as things that help us move from reaction to action – from passive to active coping – can lead to better outcomes in people with anxiety disorders.
Media contact: Lisa M.P. Munoz, CNS Public Information Officer, cns.publicaffairs@gmail.com

By lmunoz Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: fear, joseph ledoux, keynote, threat 2 Comments

Previous article: Do Not Skip that Handshake: How Body Language Shapes Our Judgments
Next article: Our Young Brains on Race: How Racial Perceptions Develop

Trackbacks

  1. Cognitive Neuroscience Society » Blog Archive » Media Advisory for CNS 20th Annual Meeting in San Fransicsco says:
    January 7, 2013 at 6:40 am

    […] and learning in young children; and Joseph LeDoux of New York University, who studies the neural basis of emotions, especially fear and […]

    Log in to Reply
  2. Cognitive Neuroscience Society » Blog Archive » CNS 2013 Meeting: Moving Away from “Fear” to Unify Field of Mind Science says:
    April 16, 2013 at 5:35 pm

    […] when discussing the workings of the brain, to better integrate the study of the mind. That was Joseph LeDoux’s message during Tuesday morning’s keynote session at CNS 2013. The New York University-based […]

    Log in to Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Recent Posts

  • Looking Forward to Understand Working Memory
  • From the Neurology Clinic to the Lab and Back Again: Addressing Frontal Lobe Syndromes
  • When Philosophical Questions Turn to Neuroscience Experimentation
  • Groups Decisions Less Burdensome to the Brain Than Solo Ones
  • The Extra Reward of Praise from Superiors

Blog Archives

Quick Tips for Getting Started on Twitter

Cognitive Neuroscience Society
c/o Center for Mind and Brain
267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95618
916-955-6080: for CNS Membership Questions
805-450-7490: for annual meeting questions about- registration, posters, symposium
916-409-5069: Fax Line
email: meeting@cogneurosociety.org

Recent Posts

  • Looking Forward to Understand Working Memory
  • From the Neurology Clinic to the Lab and Back Again: Addressing Frontal Lobe Syndromes
  • When Philosophical Questions Turn to Neuroscience Experimentation
  • Groups Decisions Less Burdensome to the Brain Than Solo Ones
  • The Extra Reward of Praise from Superiors

Archives

Blog Archives

Previous Meeting Programs and Abstracts

Past Newsletters

All contents © Cognitive Neuroscience Society 1995-2019

Add to Calendar

Add to Calendar
04/16/2022 11:00 AM
04/16/2022 12:00 PM
America/Los_Angeles
How Prior Knowledge Shapes Encoding of New Memories
Description of the event
Grand Ballroom A
Create an Account

Login Utility