Abstract
Fear extinction remains an unresolved challenge for behavioral exposure therapy in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Previous reports have suggested that social support from either familiar or unfamiliar same-sex partners is beneficial to attenuating fear responses during fear extinction and renewal. Despite that, few studies have examined the effects of social support in advance on fear extinction and/or retrieval. It is also not clear whether social company by a receptive mating partner in advance facilitates fear extinction. In the present study, we address these questions by introducing a co-housing method, where fear-conditioned male mice are co-housed with or without a receptive mating partner prior to fear extinction. We found that while co-housing with an ovariectomized female mouse showed little effect on fear extinction or retrieval, social company by a receptive mating partner in advance dramatically facilitates fear extinction. In addition, the number of cFos-positive neurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) were also found to be reduced in male mice accompanied with receptive mating partner in response to fear extinction and retrieval, indicating diminished neuronal activation. Electrophysiological studies further showed that the excitability of excitatory neurons in BLA was decreased, which is probably due to the attenuated basal level of excitatory synaptic transmission. Together, our observations demonstrate an effect of social company by a receptive mating partner can facilitate fear extinction and afford a possible cellular mechanism.
Highlights
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a serious mental disorder with lifetime prevalence that ranges from 1.3 to 12.2% (Shalev et al, 2017)
We examined the effect of social company by a receptive or non-receptive mating partner on fear extinction
We found that company by non-receptive mating partner exhibited little effect on the fear response, while company by a receptive one significantly reduced the fear response during both fear extinction trining and a retrieval test
Summary
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a serious mental disorder with lifetime prevalence that ranges from 1.3 to 12.2% (Shalev et al, 2017). “exposure” therapy is the common treatment method utilized to treat PTSD patients. The Pavlovian fear extinction model is often used to simulate exposure therapy for PTSD. In this fear extinction paradigm, animals are first trained to achieve fear memory by pairing a neutral auditory stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) with an aversive foot shock (unconditioned stimulus, US). During a fear extinction session, animals were subjected to a novel context with repeated exposure to CS alone (Milad and Quirk, 2002)
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