ArticleNeurobiology of learning and memory2016
Sex differences in discriminating between cues predicting threat and safety.
Article in Neurobiology of learning and memory, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 100 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex-dependent Schizophrenia and Drug Reward Behavioral Phenotypes in Metabotropic Glutamate 5 Receptor Heterozygous and Homozygous Mice.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2026Article
- PMAT enhances sexual dimorphism of fear behaviors and facilitates female mice's generalized contextual fear extinction.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Sex-specific exploration accounts for differences in valence learning in male and female mice.eLife · 2025Article
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- Mixed Management in Growing and Finishing Pigs: Impacts on Social Behavior and Judgment Bias.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Low affinity noradrenergic signaling promotes passive coping during reinforcement behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Age and sex independently influence safety learning in mice.Behavioural brain research · 2025Article
- Generalization and extinction of platform-mediated avoidance in male and female rats.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Sex Differences in Neural Circuits Underlying Fear Processing.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Translational approaches to the neurobiological study of conditional discrimination and inhibition: Implications for psychiatric disease.Behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
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- No evidence that post-training dopamine D2 receptor agonism affects fear generalization in male rats.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2024Article
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- Impacts of social isolation stress in safety learning and the structure of defensive behavior during a spatial-based learning task involving thermal threat.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Fear-Conditioning to Unpredictable Threats Reveals Sex and Strain Differences in Rat Fear-Potentiated Startle (FPS).Neuroscience · 2023Article
- New perspectives on sex differences in learning and memory.Trends in endocrinology and metabolism: TEM · 2023Review
- Fear-conditioning to unpredictable threats reveals sex differences in rat fear-potentiated startle (FPS).bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Sex Differences in Cognition Across Aging.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Review
- Sex differences in fear responses: Neural circuits.Neuropharmacology · 2023Review
- A sex difference in mouse dopaminergic projections from the midbrain to basolateral amygdala.Biology of sex differences · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is more prevalent in women than men. PTSD is characterized by overgeneralization of fear to innocuous stimuli and involves impaired inhibition of learned fear by cues that predict safety. While evidence indicates that learned fear inhibition through extinction differs in males and females, less is known about sex differences in fear discrimination and safety learning. Here we examined auditory fear discrimination in male and female rats. In Experiment 1A, rats underwent 1-3days of discrimination training consisting of one tone predicting threat (CS+; presented with footshock) and another tone predicting safety (CS-; presented alone). Females, but not males, discriminated between the CS+ and CS- after one day of training. After 2-3days of training, however, males discriminated whereas females generalized between the CS+ and CS-. In Experiment 1B, females showed enhanced anxiety-like behaviour and locomotor activity in the open field, although these results were unlikely to explain the sex differences in fear discrimination. In Experiment 2, we found no differences in shock sensitivity between males and females. In Experiment 3, males and females again discriminated and generalized, respectively, after three days of training. Moreover, fear generalization in females resulted from impaired safety learning, as shown by a retardation test. Whereas subsequent fear conditioning to the previous CS- retarded learning in males, females showed no such retardation. These results suggest that, while females show fear discrimination with limited training, they show fear generalization with extended training due to impaired safety learning.
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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.