Trial reportBiological psychiatry2017
Amygdala Lesions Reduce Anxiety-like Behavior in a Human Benzodiazepine-Sensitive Approach-Avoidance Conflict Test.
Trial report in Biological psychiatry, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed, 66 citations in OpenAlex.
- The effect of nicotine on threat avoidance behaviour in healthy non-smokers.Psychopharmacology · 2025Trial
- The effects of hydrocortisone and yohimbine on human behavior in approach-avoidance conflicts.Psychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- Effect of valproate and pregabalin on human anxiety-like behaviour in a randomised controlled trial.Translational psychiatry · 2018Trial
- An elevated plus-maze in mixed reality for studying human anxiety-related behavior.BMC biology · 2017Trial
- Dissecting the Function of Hippocampal Oscillations in a Human Anxiety Model.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2017Trial
- Relevance of the negative valence system, the cognitive system, and their interactions for understanding aggression in mental disorders.Der Nervenarzt · 2026Review
- Resetting the hippocampal buffer: a neurocognitive account of psychedelic therapy for anxiety-related psychopathology.Psychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Benzodiazepines for anxiety and depression: an updated overview of current use and major outcomes.Molecular biology reports · 2026Review
- Human approach-avoidance conflict behaviour relates to transdiagnostic psychiatric symptom dimensions.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Adolescent social anxiety is associated with diminished discrimination of anticipated threat and safety in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2025Article
- Amygdalar neurotransmission alterations in the BTBR mice model of idiopathic autism.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- Negative emotionality downregulation affects moral choice but not moral judgement of harm: a pharmacological study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Pathophysiology in cortico-amygdala circuits and excessive aversion processing: the role of oligodendrocytes and myelination.Brain communications · 2024Review
- Comparison of two reaction-time-based and one foraging-based behavioral approach-avoidance tasks in relation to interindividual differences and their reliability.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Elucidating medial temporal and frontal lobe contributions to approach-avoidance conflict decision-making using functional MRI and the hierarchical drift diffusion model.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Amygdala lesions are associated with improved mood after epilepsy surgery.Brain structure & function · 2023Article
- Quantifying aberrant approach-avoidance conflict in psychopathology: A review of computational approaches.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Preclinical and clinical evidence on the approach-avoidance conflict evaluation as an integrative tool for psychopathology.Epidemiology and psychiatric sciences · 2022Article
- Measuring maladaptive avoidance: from animal models to clinical anxiety.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundRodent approach-avoidance conflict tests are common preclinical models of human anxiety disorder. Their translational validity mainly rests on the observation that anxiolytic drugs reduce rodent anxiety-like behavior. Here, we capitalized on a recently developed approach-avoidance conflict computer game to investigate the impact of benzodiazepines and of amygdala lesions on putative human anxiety-like behavior. In successive epochs of this game, participants collect monetary tokens on a spatial grid while under threat of virtual predation.
methodsIn a preregistered, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, we tested the effect of a single dose (1 mg) of lorazepam (n = 59). We then compared 2 patients with bilateral amygdala lesions due to Urbach-Wiethe syndrome with age- and gender-matched control participants (n = 17). Based on a previous report, the primary outcome measure was the effect of intra-epoch time (i.e., an adaptation to increasing potential loss) on presence in the safe quadrant of the spatial grid. We hypothesized reduced loss adaptation in this measure under lorazepam and in patients with amygdala lesions.
resultsLorazepam and amygdala lesions reduced loss adaptation in the primary outcome measure. We found similar results in several secondary outcome measures. The relative reduction of anxiety-like behavior in patients with amygdala lesions was qualitatively and quantitatively indistinguishable from an impact of anterior hippocampus lesions found in a previous report.
conclusionsOur results establish the translational validity of human approach-avoidance conflict tests in terms of anxiolytic drug action. We identified the amygdala, in addition to the hippocampus, as a critical structure in human anxiety-like behavior.
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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.