Thread by @CamNeuro

Seminar Series continues tomorrow with Professor Angela Roberts @PDN_Cambridge

'Dissecting the neural circuits underlying prefrontal regulation of reward and threat responsivity in a primate'

🖊️tinyurl.com/2p9d9rs8
📽️tinyurl.com/bcy8ce76
🌍 Free and open to all!
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Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience @PDN_Cambridge, Fellow @acmedsci & @GirtonCollege, programme chair for #FENS2022 @FENSorg & winner of Goldman-Rakic Prize for outstanding achievements in Cognitive Neuroscience in 2020
Abstract below ⬇️⬇️
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Gaining insight into the overlapping neural circuits that regulate positive and negative emotion is an important step towards understanding the heterogeneity in the aetiology of anxiety and depression and developing new treatment targets.
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Determining the core contributions of the functionally heterogenous prefrontal cortex to these circuits is especially illuminating given its marked dysregulation in affective disorders.
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We'll review a series of studies in a new world monkey, the common marmoset, employing pathway-specific chemogenetics, neuroimaging, neuropharmacology and behavioural and cardiovascular analysis to dissect out prefrontal involvement in the regulation of both + & - emotion. (5/8)

Highlights will include the profound shift of sensitivity away from reward & towards threat induced by localised activations within distinct regions of vmPFC, namely areas 25 & 14...
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...as well as the opposing contributions of this region, compared to orbitofrontal & dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, in the overall responsivity to threat.
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Ongoing follow-up studies are identifying the distinct downstream pathways that mediate some of these effects as well as their differential sensitivity to rapidly acting anti-depressants.
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