The McDannald Lab at Boston College

Welcome to the McDannald Lab at Boston College! We are a behavioral neuroscience research group focused on understanding the brain mechanisms underlying fear learning. Using cutting-edge techniques and animal models, we investigate how the brain detects, predicts, and responds to threats. Our goal is to uncover the neural circuits and processes that shape fear-related behaviors, with the broader aim of informing treatments for anxiety and trauma-related disorders.

Research

Fear in the face of threat is healthy, and helps us to prevent harm. Fear when threat is unlikely, or when we are actually safe, is detrimental to our health. Our laboratory is mapping brain circuits for healthy fear. We give rats Pavlovian fear conditioning and measure an array of fear-related behaviors: running, jumping, rearing, freezing, and suppression of reward seeking. During fear conditioning, an array of tools allow us to track and manipulate brain activity. We are revealing new brain regions for healthy fear (e.g. retrorubral field) and updating our understanding of traditional fear regions (e.g. periaqueductal gray). The ultimate goal of our research is a world in which everyone experiences healthy fear.

Latest Publications

Ventral pallidum neurons are necessary to generalize and express fear-related responding in a minimal threat setting

Fear generalization is a hallmark of anxiety disorders. Experimentally, fear generalization can 29 be difficult to dissociate from its counterpart, fear discrimination. Here we use minimal threat 30 learning procedures to reveal such a dissociation. We show that in Long Evans rats, an auditory 31 threat cue predicting foot shock on 10% of trials produces a discriminated fear response that 32 does not generalize to a neutral auditory cue. Even slightly higher foot shock probabilities (30% 33 and 20%) produce fear generalization. AAV-mediated, caspase-3 deletion of ventral pallidum 34 neurons abolishes fear generalization and reduces threat cue responding during extinction. The 35 ventral pallidum’s contribution to fear generalization and extinction threat responding does not 36 depend on inputs from the nucleus accumbens. The results demonstrate a minimal threat 37 learning approach to dissociate fear discrimination from fear generalization, and a novel role for 38 the ventral pallidum in generalizing and expressing fear.