Conditioned Emotional Response Task

Conditioned Emotional Responding (CER) has strong translational relevance to human fear-conditioning and fear-extinction paradigms commonly used to study anxiety disorders, PTSD, and stress-related disorders. Both preclinical and clinical procedures assess how previously neutral stimuli acquire emotional significance and subsequently alter behavior, providing a cross-species framework for evaluating treatments targeting fear learning, threat processing, and emotional regulation.

Animals are first trained to perform an operant response for reward, after which a previously neutral stimulus is paired with an aversive event. The subsequent presentation of this conditioned stimulus suppresses reward-seeking behavior, providing a sensitive and quantitative measure of conditioned fear and emotional responding. This approach has strong translational relevance to clinical paradigms used to study fear conditioning, emotional processing, and anxiety disorders in humans. The CER assay is sensitive to standard-of-care anxiolytics, including diazepam, supporting its translational validity and utility for screening novel anxiolytic compounds.