Dear Colleagues,

we would like to cordially invite you to the upcoming Brain Imaging Meeting organized by Laboratory of Brain Imaging (LOBI) and Laboratory of Language Neurobiology (LLN).

The seminar will take place on Wednesday 19.10.2022 at 3:00 PM, at the Neurobiology Center (the first floor) or online under the link bellow.

During the meeting Anna Kaźmierowska will presents a talk entitled: "Fear contagion in human-human and human-rat dyads involves the basolateral and centromedial amygdala"

Abstract

Fear contagion is an automatic, unconscious process of aligning emotional distress of one animal to that of the other. Considering its important evolutionary role, we hypothesized it to be a cross-species phenomenon that would involve the amygdala. We thus investigated the social transfer of fear between humans and rats. The habituated rats were handled by familiar humans who underwent the fear conditioning task and following the interaction, the rats’ amygdalae activations were analyzed using the c-Fos expression. Additionally, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the activations in the amygdalar nuclei during fear contagion between human subjects. The rat amygdala was activated to a higher extent in experimental compared to control rats. A significant change in activation was observed in both basolateral and centromedial nuclei, as compared to the average activations from the control group. The amygdala activation was also present in human data, and was also significantly increased in both basolateral and centromedial nuclei when compared to the baseline hemodynamic response. These results are the first to demonstrate that the same amygdalar subparts are activated in both human-human and human-rat fear contagion. This suggests that the common system of emotional communication may exist in both humans and rats.

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https://zoom.us/j/96997359225?pwd=VzBrRlZzcFZUSUR3ZjUyZE5CaDUxQT09

Meeting ID: 969 9735 9225
Passcode: 127811
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Meeting ID: 969 9735 9225
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Brain Imaging Meeting Team
https://lobi.nencki.gov.pl/meetings/