ArticleNature neuroscience2011
Activation of dopamine neurons is critical for aversive conditioning and prevention of generalized anxiety.
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 155 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
155 citing papers in PubMed, 264 citations in OpenAlex.
- Nicotine Increases Activation to Anticipatory Valence Cues in Anterior Insula and Striatum.Nicotine & tobacco research : official journal of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco · 2018Trial
- The effect of a dopamine antagonist on conditioning of sexual arousal in women.Psychopharmacology · 2016Trial
- Distinct midbrain and habenula pathways are involved in processing aversive events in humans.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Trial
- Deletion of the sodium leak channel NALCN in dopamine neurons alters D2R-mediated signalling and psychostimulant responsiveness.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Calbindin stratifies midbrain dopaminergic neurons governing distinct aspects of locomotion.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The ventral/anterior hippocampus as a central hub for stress-related dopaminergic circuit dysfunction in psychiatric disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Review
- Uncovering the correlation between neurotransmitter-specific functional connectivity and multidimensional anxiety in a non-clinical cohort.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2026Article
- Psychophysiological effects of dance/movement therapy on anxiety reduction in adolescents in juvenile detention centers: dopamine and thermoregulatory responses in a controlled study.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2026Article
- A neural circuit basis for reward-induced suppression of fear generalization and enhancement of fear extinction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Intracisternal IGF-1 gene delivery attenuates early anxiety-like behavior but not dopaminergic neurodegeneration in a 6-OHDA rat model of parkinsonism.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2026Article
- Review
- Dopaminergic neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus may modulate social dominance in mice.Zoological research · 2025Article
- Neuropeptide S pathway in PTSD and neuropsychiatric disorders: A review.Biomolecules & biomedicine · 2025Review
- VTA-ACC dopaminergic circuit mediates trait anxiety-related observational learning of social avoidance in male mice.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Blockade of Dopamine D3 Receptors in the Ventral Tegmental Area Mitigates Fear Memory Generalization.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Stochastic decisions support optimal foraging of volatile environments, and are disrupted by anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- A midbrain circuit mechanism for noise-induced negative valence coding.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Translating stress systems: corticotropin releasing factor, its receptors, and the dopamine system in nonhuman primate models.Genomic psychiatry : advancing science from genes to society · 2025Article
- Dopamine prediction error signaling in a unique nigrostriatal circuit is critical for associative fear learning.Nature communications · 2025Article
95 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Generalized anxiety is thought to result, in part, from impairments in contingency awareness during conditioning to cues that predict aversive or fearful outcomes. Dopamine neurons of the ventral midbrain exhibit heterogeneous responses to aversive stimuli that are thought to provide a critical modulatory signal to facilitate orientation to environmental changes and assignment of motivational value to unexpected events. Here we describe a mouse model in which activation of dopamine neurons in response to an aversive stimulus is attenuated by conditional genetic inactivation of functional NMDA receptors on dopamine neurons. We discovered that altering the magnitude of excitatory responses by dopamine neurons in response to an aversive stimulus was associated with impaired conditioning to a cue that predicts an aversive outcome. Impaired conditioning by these mice was associated with the development of a persistent, generalized anxiety-like phenotype. These data are consistent with a role for dopamine in facilitating contingency awareness that is critical for the prevention of generalized anxiety.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.