v
Neuroanatomical bases of stress
responsiveness.
One of the major goals of the
laboratory is to determine the brain regions that detect and trigger many of the
behavioral, autonomic, and endocrine responses elicited by external challenges,
with an emphasis on psychological or emotional situations.
v
Role of stress in the etiology of
psychiatric disorders.
Using
the knowledge obtained with regard to the brain regions involved in the
detection and triggering of stress responses, we are trying to determine the
implications of these regions in animal models of psychiatric disorders. Thus, our working hypothesis is that one or
more regions implicated in stress responsiveness is dysregulated in one or more
types of brain disorder, leading to the symptoms that are now the hallmark of
different psychiatric disorders such as depressive illnesses, anxiety
disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorders.
v Neural mechanisms of habituation to stress.
An active area of inquiry within the
laboratory is the determination of the neural mechanisms involved in
habituation or adaptation to stress.
Stress habituation is simply defined as a reduction in stress responsiveness
when the same stressful situation is encountered over and over again. Interestingly, it is widely believed that it
is the repeated nature of stress that produces or triggers episodes of
psychiatric illnesses. However, little
is known about the brain regions or mechanisms involved in stress habituation,
and therefore, this phenomenon might turn out to be very important for our
ultimate understanding of the etiology of psychiatric illnesses.
v
Neurobiology of learning and memory.
Our
interests in the mechanisms of plasticity involved in habituation to stress
obviously generalize to other types of plasticity observed in the vertebrate
brain, including, but not limited to, Pavlovian fear conditioning. Thus, one of the major questions is whether
the cellular mechanisms that are proposed to be involved in fear conditioning
will also generalize to situations such as habituation to stress. Our laboratory is thus becoming increasingly
involved in the determination of the similarities and differences between the
plasticity observed in associative learning (such as Classical conditioning)
vs. non-associative learning (such as habituation to stress).