| Panic disorder is a debilitating psychiatric illness with an unknown etiology. There are numerous theories for the onset and maintenance of panic disorder, including biologically based and psychologically based models. One popular theory for panic disorder involves classical conditioning, proposing that bodily sensations of arousal elicit panic attacks. Developing a valid animal model of the classical conditioning theory of panic disorder would be a significant contribution to the literature of panic disorder. The present experiments investigated whether pharmacologically-induced sensations of arousal could function as conditioned stimuli (CS) in a conditioned suppression paradigm. Experiment 1 paired the stimulus effects of epinephrine (0.1 mg/kg, ip) with inescapable footshocks (... |
