Should I stay or should I go?

Stress responses in response to environmental threats promote avoidance behaviours. However, survival strategies require the flexible integration of environmental threats and internal needs to prioritise physiological demands, despite the associated risks. How neural circuits integrate threat and physiological demands to guide adaptive approach-avoidance behavioural choice remains unknown.

This presentation will provide an overview of recent research from the Kim Laboratory, demonstrating the critical involvement of hypothalamic corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) neurons. Using a series of foraging task paradigms with environments of varying danger, we find that CRH neurons are both necessary and sufficient to drive anxiety and fear behaviours. This control is highly flexible and context-dependent, allowing optimisation of behavioural choice to meet conflicting physiological needs.