Renewal of conditioned fear in male and female rats

Pavlovian extinction reduces the performance of conditioned responses and occurs when the conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly presented in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus (US). However, when the CS is experienced in a context that is different from the extinction context, there is a recovery of the conditioned response, a phenomenon known as renewal. There is some evidence that the renewal of appetitive conditioning is influenced by sex, with females failing to exhibit renewed responding. Further, there is recent evidence that renewal of fear might also not occur in female rats. In both appetitive and fear preparations, the lack of renewal in females has been postulated to be related to cycling ovarian hormones. Therefore, in Experiments 1 and 2, we directly compared fear renewal in males and females (Experiment 1) as well as ovariectomized (OVX) females (Experiment 2) when conditioning occurred in Context A, extinction in B, and testing in A (ABA renewal). Experiments 3 and 4 examined renewal when conditioning and extinction occurred in A and testing occurred in B (AAB renewal). In all experiments, renewal was not significantly different between male and female rats. Further, in Experiments 2 and 4, renewal did not differ between males, intact females, and OVX females. Additionally, in each experiment, there was no evidence that context excitation and/or inhibition contributed to renewal; instead suggesting that renewal was controlled by an occasion-setting mechanism. Overall, these results suggest little evidence for the role of sex in renewal of conditioned freezing and also indicate that cycling ovarian hormones have little role in the strength of renewal in female rats. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).