The Role of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex in the Conditioning and Extinction of Fear.
Level 5 - mechanism / opinion, no new human data
Narrative review of animal and human neurobiological literature
PubMed 26617500 · doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00298
What was done
This narrative review synthesized anatomical and physiological evidence concerning the role of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)—particularly the prelimbic (PL) and infralimbic (IL) subregions—and its interactions with the hippocampus and amygdala during fear conditioning, expression, and extinction in rodents and humans.
What was found
The abstract provides no quantitative data or effect sizes. The authors challenge the strict dichotomy that PL solely drives fear expression while IL drives suppression, proposing that PL and IL often display functional covariation and coordinated activity during aversive conditioning and fear modulation due to shared inputs, parallel outputs, or local cortico-cortical connections.
Why it matters
Refining the neural circuit models of prefrontal control over fear helps clarify the neurobiological mechanisms that may be disrupted in conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety disorders.
Limits
The paper is a narrative review without systematic search criteria or meta-analytic data. Most cited mechanisms derive from rodent neurophysiology, which may not fully capture human fear circuit dynamics.
Cited by
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