Clinical disorders arising from maladaptive emotion regulation present a large burden on society worldwide. Many of these disorders show comorbidity, for example, addiction with anxiety disorders. Even though there has been much research on reward and fear processing, the majority of studies have been conducted in parallel, investigating the circuitries separately. If we hope to understand and treat comorbid disorders resulting from maladaptive emotion regulation we need to increase our efforts in investigating how these circuitries integrate their functions to influence behavior. This is the focus of the Sangha Lab. We have developed a novel behavioral paradigm explicitly designed to assess reward, fear and safety cue learning together in order to investigate the multiple circuitries that regulate these learning processes. Using a combination of behavioral, electrophysiological and pharmacological techniques, we track biological changes in the rat brain as it is learning about reward, fear, and safety signals.
