Two new papers were just published by the Samuels Lab. Both papers were led by senior graduate student Andrew Dieterich. The first of these, published in Translational Psychiatry examined sex-specific deficits for motivated behaviors in an animal model of mood disorders. The second paper, published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience examines how a projection from the basolateral portion of the amygdala to the nucleus accumbens participates in the maladaptive behaviors that occur in chronic stress. The study discovered that there are very specific, but nuanced roles for the basolateral amygdala-nucleus accumbens pathway in changing reward-seeking and other motivated behaviors.
