Fear Factor

Article
https://barnard.edu/magazine/spring-2018/fear-factor

Currently she is homing in on how fear and anxiety interact in particular types of rats. The BNST, for example, is one of the few structures in the brain that is different for male and female rats. While most of her experiments so far have been done with male rats, Bauer is starting to look at female rats to see if they process fear and anxiety differently.

Most of her experiments to date have been conducted using adult animals. But Bauer is also examining differences in fear learning among adolescent rats. For humans, adolescence is often a time of increased stress as well as increased risk for developing anxiety or depression. Bauer has already shown that adolescent rats exposed to stressful situations are less able to extinguish fears than adult rats, which could possibly explain why adolescents are more susceptible to long-term anxiety than adults.

In continuing experiments like these, Bauer hopes to get us closer to an understanding of how our fears develop in the brain, ultimately providing some possible strategies for how we might better deal with them. “That could include new drugs or behavioral therapies to affect the brain’s fear-learning processes,” helping people conquer their fears and anxieties and live more productive lives.