week 4

After reading Henry et al and Reznikov et al papers, I can not say I liked one better than the other.  I didn’t know much about PTSD studies and thus while reading Renikov et al paper it took me a while to understand the specifics for categorizing the animals as weak or strong extinction and their implications.  However, I truly found interesting the fact that they saw lower levels of corticosterone on the weak extinction animals, which are the ones that showed PTSD behavior.  As many other studies have shown, and as many expect increased levels of corticosterone or cortisol in humans, it is usually related to high levels of stress.   I can’t quite find a valuable explanation as to why this is and would love for them to expand on the studies of this hormone on another type of behavioral tests, as to see the role of this under other types of stress.  Moreover, as they in fact mentioned their study needs a bigger sample size as to make this study more valuable in the scientific field.  On another hand, I truly like the structure they used in the paper, as it was almost always clear and they concluded by putting everything together, including what they would like to do in the future.

            Having studied condition stimulus, both fear and safety conditioning in relation to anxious and depressive behavior made Henry et al a great following paper. Moreover, the same paper focusing on conditioning stimulus had a great part studying the biological basis under it and likewise Henry et al focused on differential neurons in the BA which were involved in extinction and fear. This is something I believe could be studied in humans, which is something I truly like.  One could probably use scanning and electrodes to observe the firing of these during behavioral tests.   However, when considering their observations on curing some fear by inducing fear, then I am not sure how applicable this could be to the human population.   How could one negatively train someone that is already experiencing negative or in this case fearful or depressive emotions and states?