Dopamine and fear extinction: genetic evidence
Whittle, N., Maurer, V., Murphy, C., Rainer, J., Bindreither, D., Hauschild, M., . . . Singewald, N. (2016). Enhancing dopaminergic signaling and histone acetylation promotes long-term rescue of deficient fear extinction. Transl Psychiatry, 6, e974. doi:10.1038/tp.2016.231 Ok, I write this post just to help me understand this paper better. The studies of Extinction all hope to solve one problem: how to make the extinction context-independent? This problem is important because extinction is the key for exposure-therapy in clinical settings. Make the extinction context-independent means that it will help the exposure-therapy more effective. Haaker et al. (2013) found that single dose of L-dopa can help the extinction less context-dependent. In this study, Whittle et al. replicated the key results of Haaker et al. (2013). Here is some methodology part of this paper, as I paraphrased. Methods subject: 129S1/SvImJ (S1) mice, which that exhibit normal fear learnin