From Conditioning to Emotion: Translating Animal Models of Learning to Human Psychopathology

Emotional responses are not static but change as a consequence of learning. Organisms adapt to emotional events
and these adaptations influence the way we think, behave, and feel when we encounter similar situations in the future.
Integrating recent work from rodent models and research on human psychopathology, this article lays out a model
describing how affective events cause learning and can lead to anxiety and depression: affective events are linked
to conditioned stimuli and contexts. Affective experiences entrain oscillatory synchrony across distributed neural
circuits, including the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens, which form associations that
constitute the basis of emotional memories. Consolidation of these experiences appears to be supported by replay in
the hippocampus—a process by which hippocampal firing patterns recreate the firing pattern that occurred previously.
Generalization of learning occurs to never before experienced contexts when associations form across distinct but
related conditioned stimuli. The process of generalization, which requires cortical structures, can cause memories
to become abstracted. During abstraction, the latent, overlapping features of the learned associations remain and
result in the formation of schemas. Schemas are adaptive because they facilitate the rapid processing of conditioned
stimuli and prime behavioral, cognitive, and affective responses that are the manifestations of the accumulation of
an individual’s conditioned experiences. However, schemas can be maladaptive when the generalization of aversive
emotional responses are applied to stimuli and contexts in which affective reactions are unnecessary. I describe how
this process can lead to not only mood and anxiety disorders but also psychotherapeutic treatment.