Fear Conditioning in Rodents and Humans

Fear conditioning is an experimental tool that has been, and continues to be, widely used in the field of neuroscience. It is used to understand the neural and psychological bases for fear learning and more recently for fear extinction, along with several other phenomena such as reinstatement and spontaneous recovery. Like any other experimental paradigm, there are several variants of fear conditioning that are employed by investigators. The parameters utilized, such as the type of conditioned stimuli and the unconditioned stimuli, vary from one study to another depending on the scientific question being tested. In this chapter, we will provide an overall summary of the most commonly used parameters and discuss the reasons for changing and/or modifying such parameters. We discuss technical problems that may arise when using the fear-conditioning paradigm in both rodents and humans and how best to resolve them.