Social modulation of associative fear learning by pheromone communication
- 1Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA;
- 2Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA;
- 3West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, Los Angeles, California 90073, USA
Abstract
Mice communicate through visual, vocal, and olfactory cues that influence innate, nonassociative behavior. We here report that exposure to a recently fear-conditioned familiar mouse impairs acquisition of conditioned fear and facilitates fear extinction, effects mimicked by both an olfactory chemosignal emitted by a recently fear-conditioned familiar mouse and by the putative stress-related anxiogenic pheromone β-phenylethylamine (β-PEA). Together, these findings suggest social modulation of higher-order cognitive processing through pheromone communication and support the concurrent excitor hypothesis of extinction learning.
Footnotes
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↵ Corresponding author.
↵ E-mail tbredy{at}mednet.ucla.edu; fax (310) 825-9870.
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Article is online at http://www.learnmem.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/lm.1226009.
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- Received September 16, 2008.
- Accepted October 16, 2008.
- Copyright © 2009 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
