Contextual Associations Research Articles

Contextual associations represented both in neural networks and human behavior

Contextual associations facilitate object recognition in human vision. However, the role of context in artificial vision remains elusive as does the characteristics that humans use to define context. We investigated whether contextually related objects (bicycle-helmet) are represented more similarly in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used for image understanding than unrelated objects (bicycle-fork). Stimuli were of objects against a white background and consisted of a diverse set of contexts (N = 73). CNN representations of contextually related objects were more similar to one another than to unrelated objects across all CNN layers. Critically, the similarity found in CNNs correlated with human behavior across multiple experiments assessing contextual relatedness, emerging significant only in the later layers. The results demonstrate that context is inherently represented in CNNs as a result of object recognition training, and that the representation in the later layers of the network tap into the contextual regularities that predict human behavior.

Momentary Influences on Self-Regulation in Two Populations With Health Risk Behaviors: Adults Who Smoke and Adults Who Are Overweight and Have Binge-Eating Disorder.

IntroductionSelf-regulation has been implicated in health risk behaviors and is a target of many health behavior interventions. Despite most prior research focusing on self-regulation as an individual-level trait, we hypothesize that self-regulation is a time-varying mechanism of health and risk behavior that may be influenced by momentary contexts to a substantial degree. Because most health behaviors (e.g., eating, drinking, smoking) occur in the context of everyday activities, digital technologies may help us better understand and influence these behaviors in real time. Using a momentary self-regulation measure, the current study (which was part of a larger multi-year research project on the science of behavior change) used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to assess if self-regulation can be engaged and manipulated on a momentary basis in naturalistic, non-laboratory settings.MethodsThis one-arm, open-label exploratory study prospectively collected momentary data for 14 days from 104 participants who smoked regularly and 81 participants who were overweight and had binge-eating disorder. Four times per day, participants were queried about momentary self-regulation, emotional state, and social and environmental context; recent smoking and exposure to smoking cues (smoking sample only); and recent eating, binge eating, and exposure to binge-eating cues (binge-eating sample only). This study used a novel, momentary self-regulation measure comprised of four subscales: momentary perseverance, momentary sensation seeking, momentary self-judgment, and momentary mindfulness. Participants were also instructed to engage with Laddr, a mobile application that provides evidence-based health behavior change tools via an integrated platform. The association between momentary context and momentary self-regulation was explored via mixed-effects models. Exploratory assessments of whether recent Laddr use (defined as use within 12 h of momentary responses) modified the association between momentary context and momentary self-regulation were performed via mixed-effects models.ResultsParticipants (mean age 35.2; 78% female) in the smoking and binge-eating samples contributed a total of 3,233 and 3,481 momentary questionnaires, respectively. Momentary self-regulation subscales were associated with several momentary contexts, in the combined as well as smoking and binge-eating samples. For example, in the combined sample momentary perseverance was associated with location, positively associated with positive affect, and negatively associated with negative affect, stress, and tiredness. In the smoking sample, momentary perseverance was positively associated with momentary difficulty in accessing cigarettes, caffeine intake, and momentary restraint in smoking, and negatively associated with temptation and urge to smoke. In the binge-eating sample, momentary perseverance was positively associated with difficulty in accessing food and restraint in eating, and negatively associated with urge to binge eat. While recent Laddr use was not associated directly with momentary self-regulation subscales, it did modify several of the contextual associations, including challenging contexts.ConclusionsOverall, this study provides preliminary evidence that momentary self-regulation may vary in response to differing momentary contexts in samples from two exemplar populations with risk behaviors. In addition, the Laddr application may modify some of these relationships. These findings demonstrate the possibility of measuring momentary self-regulation in a trans-diagnostic way and assessing the effects of momentary, mobile interventions in context. Health behavior change interventions may consider measuring and targeting momentary self-regulation in addition to trait-level self-regulation to better understand and improve health risk behaviors. This work will be used to inform a later stage of research focused on assessing the transdiagnostic mediating effect of momentary self-regulation on medical regimen adherence and health outcomes.Clinical Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov, Identifier: NCT03352713.

Aspect-level sentiment analysis with aspect-specific context position information

In recent years, an increasing number of researchers have focused on the aspect-level sentiment analysis in the field of natural language processing. A coarse-grained sentiment analysis at the document level and a sentiment analysis at the sentence level can only judge an entire text comprehensively, whereas a fine-grained sentiment analysis distinguishes each concrete aspect of the text and makes separate judgments on the sentiment polarity. The word vector representation obtained by a recurrent neural network lacks a description of the distance relationship between the context words and aspect, and traditional models rarely consider the influence of the association between contextual sentences. In this paper, we propose an aspect-level sentiment analysis model with aspect-specific contextual location information. By designing two asymmetrical contextual position weight functions respectively, the model adjusts the weight of contextual words according to the positions of the aspect words in the sentences, and alleviates the interference of the difference in the number of words on both sides of the aspect words on the judgment of sentimental polarity. By utilizing single-sentence-level and multiple-sentence-level bidirectional GRU layers, model will extract the influence of the contextual association of each sentence in the document on the aspect sentiment polarity of individual sentences. In addition, we analyze the distribution properties of hard samples and design a novel loss function for the class imbalance problem in the field of sentiment analysis. For dataset 15Rest, the accuracy of our model is 4.27% higher than that of ASGCN, whereas the f1-score, which is more indicative of the classification performance on an imbalanced dataset, can be seen to be improved by 4.31% in comparison to the ASGCN.

Exploring Residents' Well-Being and Burnout via Qualitative Ecological Momentary Assessment.

Most of what is known about resident burnout and wellness comes from cross-sectional snapshot surveys. The purpose of this study was to elicit qualitative perspectives on wellness from a cohort of internal residents over time using ecological momentary assessment. Drawing on principles of ecological momentary assessment, 13 different open-ended survey prompts were delivered between October and March during the 2019-2020 academic year. Participants were 88 randomly selected internal medicine residents from 4 internal medicine training programs in the Northeast. The response rate was 95%. Three main themes regarding wellness were self, program/education environment, and medical/structural system. A fourth theme, the desire to provide quality patient care, cut across all other themes. The patient care theme repeatedly stressed residents' desire to spend more time with patients. The self theme primarily reflected messages about personal emotions and the need for work-life balance and wellness. The program/education environment theme reflected the value of learning, teamwork and community, and program culture. The medical/structural system theme showed that residents' experiences were shaped by the efficiency of their days and largely a product of their schedules and administrative support. Closing advice to future trainees was optimistic and reassuring. While findings support much of what has been learned via single-occasion survey snapshots, an ecological momentary assessment design allowed a deeper dive into contextual associations. The results affirm the primacy of patient care and also highlight the value of teamwork and culture. Peers and program leaders are heavily influential in setting the tone for the learning experience, whether for the day or with a more enduring message of respect and support. There is opportunity to maximize high- or higher-value learning experiences for residents and find solutions to reduce and reframe the perceived "low-value administrative work" that is part of care coordination.

Cross-modal contextual memory guides selective attention in visual-search tasks.

Visual search is speeded when a target item is positioned consistently within an invariant (repeatedly encountered) configuration of distractor items ("contextual cueing"). Contextual cueing is also observed in cross-modal search, when the location of the-visual-target is predicted by distractors from another-tactile-sensory modality. Previous studies examining lateralized waveforms of the event-related potential (ERP) with millisecond precision have shown that learned visual contexts improve a whole cascade of search-processing stages. Drawing on ERPs, the present study tested alternative accounts of contextual cueing in tasks in which distractor-target contextual associations are established across, as compared to, within sensory modalities. To this end, we devised a novel, cross-modal search task: search for a visual feature singleton, with repeated (and nonrepeated) distractor configurations presented either within the same (visual) or a different (tactile) modality. We found reaction times (RTs) to be faster for repeated versus nonrepeated configurations, with comparable facilitation effects between visual (unimodal) and tactile (crossmodal) context cues. Further, for repeated configurations, there were enhanced amplitudes (and reduced latencies) of ERPs indexing attentional allocation (PCN) and postselective analysis of the target (CDA), respectively; both components correlated positively with the RT facilitation. These effects were again comparable between uni- and crossmodal cueing conditions. In contrast, motor-related processes indexed by the response-locked LRP contributed little to the RT effects. These results indicate that both uni- and crossmodal context cues benefit the same, visual processing stages related to the selection and subsequent analysis of the search target.

Community-level social participation and functional disability among older adults: A JAGES multilevel longitudinal study

PurposeThis study investigates the contextual association between types of community-level social participation and functional disability. MethodsWe used 6-year prospective cohort data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study 2010–2016, a nationwide survey of 35,519 functionally independent older adults (mean age: 73.30 ± 5.91 years, 49.6% females). The incidence of functional disability was obtained from municipal long-term care insurance databases. Social participation was assessed at individual and community levels and was categorized as: volunteer, sports, hobby and neighborhood groups, and senior citizen clubs. We calculated the 95% confidence interval (CI) and the hazard ratio (HR) by applying a three-level multilevel survival analysis. ResultsDuring the 6-year observation period, the onset of functional disability occurred among 3473 adults. A higher prevalence of sports (HR 0.88, 95% CI 0.80 to 0.96) and hobby group participation (HR 0.91, 95% CI 0.87 to 0.96) showed significant contextual relationships with functional disability after adjusting for potential confounders. Among females, community-level neighborhood group participation significantly lowered the incidence of functional disability (HR 0.87, 95% CI 0.76 to 0.998). ConclusionsWe found a beneficial effect of a contextual relationship between community-level sports and hobby group participation and functional disability among older adults. Moreover, females benefited a lot from community-level social participation. We propose that promoting sports and hobby groups in a community may help to prevent functional disability among older adults.

Age-related differences when searching in a real environment: The use of semantic contextual guidance and incidental object encoding.

Visual search is a crucial, everyday activity that declines with ageing. Here, referring to the environmental support account, we hypothesised that semantic contextual associations between the target and the neighbouring objects (e.g., a teacup near a tea bag and a spoon), acting as external cues, may counteract this decline. Moreover, when searching for a target, viewers may encode information about the co-present distractor objects, by simply looking at them. In everyday life, where viewers often search for several targets within the same environment, such distractor objects may often become targets of future searches. Thus, we examined whether incidentally fixating a target during previous trials, when it was a distractor, may also modulate the impact of ageing on search performance. We used everyday object arrays on tables in a real room, where healthy young and older adults had to search sequentially for multiple objects across different trials within the same array. We showed that search was quicker (1) in young than older adults; (2) for targets surrounded by semantically associated objects than unassociated objects, but only in older adults; and (3) for incidentally fixated targets than for targets that were not fixated when they were distractors, with no differences between young and older adults. These results suggest that older viewers use both environmental support based on object semantic associations and object information incidentally encoded to enhance efficiency of real-world search, even in relatively simple environments. This reduces, but does not eliminate, search decline related to ageing.

SiamBC: Context-Related Siamese Network for Visual Object Tracking

The existing Siamese trackers have achieved increasingly results in visual tracking. However, the contextual association between template and search region is not been fully studied in previous Siamese Network-based methods, meanwhile, the feature information of the cross-correlation layer is investigated insufficiently. In this paper, we propose a new context-related Siamese network called SiamBC to address these issues. By introducing a cooperate attention mechanism based on block deformable convolution sampling features, the tracker can pre-match and enhance similar features to improve accuracy and robustness when the context embedding between the template and search fully interacted. In addition, we design a cascade cross correlation module. The cross-correlation layer of the stacked structure can gradually refine the deep information of the mined features and further improve the accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our tracker on six tracking benchmarks including OTB100, VOT2019, GOT10k, LaSOT, TrackingNet and UAV123. The code will be available at https://github.com/Soarkey/SiamBC.

The Role of Embodied Simulation and Visual Imagery in Emotional Contagion with Music

Emotional contagion has been explained as arising from embodied simulation. The two most accepted theories of music-induced emotions presume a mechanism of internal mimicry: the BRECVEMA framework proposes that the melodic aspect of music elicits internal mimicry leading to the induction of basic emotions in the listener, and the Multifactorial Process Model proposes that the observation or imagination of motor expressions of the musicians elicits muscular and neural mimicry, and emotional contagion. Two behavioral studies investigated whether, and to what extent, mimicry is responsible for emotion contagion, and second, to what extent context for affective responses in the form of visual imagery moderates emotional responses. Experiment 1 tested whether emotional contagion is influenced by mimicry by manipulating explicit vocal and motor mimicry. In one condition, participants engaged in mimicry of the melodic aspects of the music by singing along with the music, and in another, participants engaged in mimicry of the musician’s gestures when producing the music, by playing along (“air guitar”-style). The experiment did not find confirmatory evidence for either hypothesized simulation mechanism, but it did provide evidence of spontaneous visual imagery consistent with the induced and perceived emotions. Experiment 2 used imagined rather than performed mimicry, but found no association between imagined motor simulation and emotional intensity. Emotional descriptions read prior to hearing the music influenced the type of perceived and induced emotions and support the prediction that visual imagery and associated semantic knowledge shape listeners’ affective experiences with music. The lack of evidence for the causal role of embodied simulation suggests that current theorization of emotion contagion by music needs refinement to reduce the role of simulation relative to other mechanisms. Evidence for induction of affective states that can be modulated by contextual and semantic associations suggests a model of emotion induction consistent with constructionist accounts.

Entity recognition of Chinese medical text based on multi-head self-attention combined with BILSTM-CRF.

Named entities are the main carriers of relevant medical knowledge in Electronic Medical Records (EMR). Clinical electronic medical records lead to problems such as word segmentation ambiguity and polysemy due to the specificity of Chinese language structure, so a Clinical Named Entity Recognition (CNER) model based on multi-head self-attention combined with BILSTM neural network and Conditional Random Fields is proposed. Firstly, the pre-trained language model organically combines char vectors and word vectors for the text sequences of the original dataset. The sequences are then fed into the parallel structure of the multi-head self-attention module and the BILSTM neural network module, respectively. By splicing the output of the neural network module to obtain multi-level information such as contextual information and feature association weights. Finally, entity annotation is performed by CRF. The results of the multiple comparison experiments show that the structure of the proposed model is very reasonable and robust, and it can effectively improve the Chinese CNER model. The model can extract multi-level and more comprehensive text features, compensate for the defect of long-distance dependency loss, with better applicability and recognition performance.

Text sentiment analysis of fusion model based on attention mechanism

Text sentiment tendency analysis is a hot task in natural language processing. And text as the essential expression form of language, both individual word information, and overall utterance, deserves to be focused on. This paper proposes a fusion model to achieve high precision text sentiment analysis. This model combines the advantages of CNN to extract local information of text and BiLSTM to extract contextual association of text and introduces the attention mechanism to increase the focus on words with a solid emotional tendency in the text. The training datasets are comments that crawled from several social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. Based on the attention mechanism, this paper investigates the semantic sentiment analysis to reach the study of classification prediction for analyzing the positive and negative sentiment of financial news, social media, etc. The experimental results show that the proposed method can better extract features from the text and classify them than other baseline models.

GasBotty: Multi-Metric Extraction in the Wild

The lived environment, particularly when proximal to roadways, is filled with multi-digit and multi-numbered values corresponding to advertised commodities. The reliable detection of single multi-digit values from natural imagery has been widely studied through the last decade (e.g. Street View House Numbers [SVHN]); however, extraction and assignment of the contextual meaning of those values are far more difficult given the diversity and unstructured nature of advertisements. To operationalize information extracted from detected values in the wild, the contextual meaning that those values represent is critical. To our knowledge, no large-scale visual dataset comprising multi-digit, multi-number values with associated context labels exists; we denote this class of problems as “multi-metric extraction in the wild”. In this work, we focus on the accurate detection and reading of gas prices, and their contextual association to gas grade and payment type. We provide complete annotations for the Gas Prices of America (GPA) dataset, comprising 2,048 training and 512 test images sampled across the United States including over 2,600 signs, 6,000 prices, 27,000 digits, and 7,800 gas grade and payment type labels. With these data, we develop the GasBotty predictor, a composite neural network model, and evaluate it over eight benchmark tasks of increasing difficulty. Finally, we define a new highly stringent, binary-type metric, denoted “All-or-Nothing Accuracy” (ANA), requiring that a predictor perfectly extract and correctly associate all information in a gas sign. Our proposed model achieves 72.9% ANA over the independent test set of 512 images, where conventional state-of-the-art models object detection models and both a uniform random and biased random predictor would all tend towards 0% ANA. GasBotty and the GPA dataset will serve as a valuable benchmark for the development of future multi-metric extraction in the wild systems.

Community-level educational attainment and dementia: a 6-year longitudinal multilevel study in Japan

BackgroundAs the understanding of the association between community-level education and dementia is insufficient, this study examined the contextual association of community-level prevalence of low educational attainment on the risk of dementia incidence. With this study, we further explored the potential differences in the aforementioned associations for urban and non-urban areas.MethodsWe analyzed 6 years of prospective cohort data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, beginning with the baseline data collected between 2010 and 2012, for 51,186 physically and cognitively independent individuals aged ≥65 years (23,785 men and 27,401 women) from 346 communities in 16 municipalities across 7 prefectures. We assessed dementia incidence using available data from the long-term care insurance system in Japan. We dichotomized education years as ≤9 and ≥ 10 years and aggregated individual-level educational attainment as a community-level independent variable. Model 1 covariates were age and sex. Income, residential years, disease, alcohol, smoking, social isolation, and population density were added in Model 2. We conducted multiple imputation to address the missing data. We performed a two-level (community and individual) survival analysis to calculate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).ResultsThe results indicate that the cumulative incidence of dementia during the follow-up period was 10.6%. The mean proportion with educational attainment of ≤9 years was 40.8% (range: 5.1–87.3%). Low community-level educational attainment was significantly associated with higher dementia incidence (HR: 1.04; 95% CI: 1.01–1.07), estimated by 10 percentage points of low educational attainment after adjusting for individual-level educational years and covariates. While the association was significant in non-urban areas (HR: 1.07; 1.02–1.13), there was no association in urban areas (HR: 1.03; 0.99–1.06).ConclusionsOlder people living in communities with low educational attainment among their age demographic develop dementia more often compared with those living in areas with high educational attainment after adjusting for individual-level educational attainment and covariates; the association was pronounced in non-urban areas. Securing education for adolescents as a life course and population approach could thus be crucial in preventing dementia later in life among older people living in non-urban areas.

Withdrawal from cocaine conditioning progressively alters AMPA receptor-mediated transmission in the ventral hippocampus.

Drugs of abuse, such as cocaine, produce aberrant changes in synaptic transmission and plasticity that emerge throughout withdrawal. One region of the brain that displays a high degree of synaptic plasticity, as well as connectivity with mesolimbic structures such as the nucleus accumbens, is the ventral hippocampus (vH). Here, we investigated the effects of an escalating cocaine dosing schedule on vH CA1 excitatory transmission by measuring place preference and recording excitatory postsynaptic currents (EPSCs) at three different withdrawal time points: withdrawal day (WD) 2, 9 or 28. Behaviourally, this escalating cocaine-conditioning protocol was capable of producing conditioned place preference that persisted through WD28. Physiologically, cocaine conditioning produced an increase in vH excitatory transmission on WD2 that appeared to be the result of an increase in calcium-impermeable (CI)-AMPA receptor density. Excitatory transmission was still enhanced in cocaine-treated animals on WD9; however, a significant increase in the contribution of calcium-permeable (CP)-AMPA receptors to EPSCs was detected as compared with WD2. By WD28, these CP-AMPA receptors provided a major contribution to vH CA1 excitatory transmission, resulting in synaptic responses distinct from WD2 and WD9. Taken together, these results highlight progressive changes in vH synaptic transmission during withdrawal that may enhance cocaine contextual associations.

Intact context memory performance in adults with autism spectrum disorder

Research on memory in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) finds increased difficulty encoding contextual associations in episodic memory and suggests executive dysfunction (e.g., selective attention, cognitive flexibility) and deficient metacognitive monitoring as potential contributing factors. Findings from our lab suggest that age-related impairments in selective attention contribute to those in context memory accuracy and older adults tended to show dependence in context memory accuracy between relevant and irrelevant context details (i.e., hyper-binding). Using an aging framework, we tested the effects of selective attention on context memory in a sample of 23 adults with ASD and 23 typically developed adults. Participants studied grayscale objects flanked by two types of contexts (color, scene) on opposing sides and were told to attend to only one object-context relationship, ignoring the other context. At test, participants made object and context recognition decisions and judgment of confidence decisions allowing for an evaluation of context memory performance, hyper-binding, and metacognitive performance for context judgments in a single task. Results showed that adults with ASD performed similarly to typically developed adults on all measures. These findings suggest that context memory performance is not always disrupted in adults with ASD, even when demands on selective attention are high. We discuss the need for continued research to evaluate episodic memory in a wider variety of adults with ASD.

‘Unusual ingredients’: Developing a cross-domain model for multisensory artistic practice linking food and music

This article explores linkages between sensory experiences of food and music in light of recent research from gastrophysics, 4E cognition (i.e. embodied, embedded, extended and enactive) and ecological perception theory. Drawing on these research disciplines, this article outlines a model for multisensory artistic practice, and a taxonomy of cross-domain creative strategies, based on the identification of sensory affordances between the domains of food and music. Food objects are shown to ‘afford’ cross-domain interrelationships with sound stimuli based on our capacity to sense their material characteristics, and to make sense of them through prior experience and contextual association. We propose that multisensory artistic works can themselves afford extended forms of sensory awareness by synthesizing and mediating stimuli across the selected domains, in order to form novel, or unexpected sensory linkages. These ideas are explored with reference to an ongoing artistic research project entitled ‘Unusual ingredients’, creating new music to complement and enhance the characteristics of selected food.

Representing contextual associations in convolutional neural networks

Representing contextual associations in convolutional neural networks

Perceptions towards an interaction partner predict social anxiety: an ecological momentary assessment study

ABSTRACT Social anxiety occurs in everyday social interactions, yet the real-world factors that shape the moment-to-moment experience of social anxiety have not been fully explored. Using ecological momentary assessments (smartphone-based, five signals a day for 21 days), the present study examined the associations between state social anxiety (SSA) and characteristics of interaction partners in varied contexts, and how these momentary associations differed with trait social anxiety (TSA). Ninety-two participants (54% female, age from 18 to 34) completed 4185 momentary reports. Results from multilevel models showed that perceived judgmentalness and unfamiliarity of interaction partners were positively associated with SSA, and the associations were stronger for the high TSA group (n = 30) compared to a control group (n = 62). Exploratory analyses with various types of interaction partners and social settings revealed noticeable group differences in how the types were associated with SSA (e.g. acquaintance, close friend/romantic partner) and how they influenced the effect of judgmentalness and unfamiliarity on SSA (e.g. authority, work/school). Overall, the findings highlight the role of contextual associations in social anxiety, and the benefits and the need for more comprehensive approaches with EMA in studying social anxiety, particularly its contextual aspects.

“We Foreigners Lived In Our Foreign Bubble”: Understanding Colorblind Ideology In Expatriate Narratives1

Racial colorblindness—the desire to not “see color”—or avoiding any use of the term “race” itself, has been an antiracist imperative in post‐WWII Sweden in order to leave behind the prior era of eugenics and racial thinking. Through a multi‐sited linguistic ethnographic study, this article examines how 46 returning Swedish expatriate women talk about race and whiteness in race‐related experiences and interactions, using colorblind language. By analyzing the implicit contextual associations and dissociations made between race, language, subjectivity, and nation, a system of ideas and cognitive structures mapping perceptions and constructions of the world is exposed; of national belonging, racialized bodies, racial hierarchies, and perceptions of the West itself. In their migrant narratives, however, the categories used could be ascribed opposite meanings, depending on subjectivity and context. In this logic, language and nationality becomes “visible” or “hidden” depending on time and place, while “visible whiteness” can be associated with either an undesirable sense of difference or a set of unspoken privileges.

Increased mGlu5 mRNA expression in BLA glutamate neurons facilitates resilience to the long-term effects of a single predator scent stress exposure.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) develops in a subset of individuals exposed to a trauma with core features being increased anxiety and impaired fear extinction. To model the heterogeneity of PTSD behavioral responses, we exposed male Sprague-Dawley rats to predator scent stress once for 10min and then assessed anxiety-like behavior 7 days later using the elevated plus maze and acoustic startle response. Rats displaying anxiety-like behavior in both tasks were classified as stress Susceptible, and rats exhibiting behavior no different from un-exposed Controls were classified as stress Resilient. In Resilient rats, we previously found increased mRNA expression of mGlu5 in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex (PFC) and CB1 in the amygdala. Here, we performed fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) to determine the subregion and cell-type-specific expression of these genes in Resilient rats 3weeks after TMT exposure. Resilient rats displayed increased mGlu5 mRNA expression in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the infralimbic and prelimbic regions of the PFC and increased BLA CB1 mRNA. These increases were limited to glutamatergic cells. To test the necessity of mGlu5 for attenuating TMT-conditioned contextual fear 3weeks after TMT conditioning, intra-BLA infusions of the mGlu5 negative allosteric modulator MTEP were administered prior to context re-exposure. In TMT-exposed Resilient rats, but not Controls, MTEP increased freezing on the day of administration, which extinguished over two additional un-drugged sessions. These results suggest that increased mGlu5 expression in BLA glutamate neurons contributes to the behavioral flexibility observed in stress-Resilient animals by facilitating a capacity for extinguishing contextual fear associations.