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Survival circuits and risk assessment
Publication date: December 2018Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 24Author(s): Neil McNaughton, Philip J CorrRisk assessment (RA) behaviour is unusual in the context of survival circuits. An external object elicits eating, mating or fleeing; but conflict between internal approach and withdrawal tendencies elicits RA-specific behaviour that scans the environment for new information to bring closure. Recently rodent and human threat responses have been compared using ‘predators’ that can be real (e.g. a tarantula), robot, virtual, or symbolic (with the last three rendered predatory by the use of shock...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - July 10, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Survival circuits and therapy: from automaticity to the conscious experience of fear and anxiety
Publication date: December 2018Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 24Author(s): Steven C Hayes, Stefan G HofmannWe will briefly examine the implication of a multi-dimensional and multi-level view of evolution for addressing the role and function of survival circuits in the context of human cognition, and the underlying emotional, memory, and behavioral processes both impact. It is our contention that human cognition can partially direct and channel these more ancient neurobiological regulatory systems. We argue that while survival circuits can be helpful or hurtful to human functioning, they are particul...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - July 10, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Prospection and natural selection
Publication date: December 2018Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 24Author(s): T Suddendorf, A Bulley, B MiloyanProspection refers to thinking about the future, a capacity that has become the subject of increasing research in recent years. Here we first distinguish basic prospection, such as associative learning, from more complex prospection commonly observed in humans, such as episodic foresight, the ability to imagine diverse future situations and organize current actions accordingly. We review recent studies on complex prospection in various contexts, such as decision-making, planning, deliberate pr...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - July 10, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

The ethological deconstruction of fear(s)
Publication date: December 2018Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 24Author(s): Dean MobbsThe natural world presents a myriad of dangers that can threaten an organism's survival. This diversity of threats is matched by a set of universal and species specific defensive behaviors which are often subsumed under the emotions of fear and anxiety. A major issue in the field of affective science, however, is that these emotions are often conflated and scientists fail to reflect the ecological conditions that gave rise to them. I attempt to clarify these semantic issues by describing the link between ethological...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - July 10, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research

Fear paradigms: The times they are a-changin’
Publication date: December 2018Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 24Author(s): Jeansok J Kim, Min Whan JungFear is considered an integral part of the brain's defensive mechanism that evolved to protect animals and humans from predation and other ecological threats. Hence, it is logical to study fear from the perspective of antipredator-survival behaviors and circuits by sampling a range of threatening situations that organisms are likely to encounter in the wild. In the past several decades, however, mainstream fear research has focused on the importance of associative learning; that is, how animals bec...
Source: Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences - July 10, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research