Abstract
The insular cortex is a multimodal hub affected across a number of psychiatric disorders and serves diverse functions, including sensory processing, physiological homeostasis and emotions. Recent work from my lab highlights that the insular cortex may also play an important role in gating optimal fear levels and thus may be crucial for maintaining ‘emotion homeostasis’. Using the mouse as model organism, we find that the insular cortex is required to establish adaptive fear levels by balancing fear maintenance and extinction learning in a classical fear-conditioning paradigm. We demonstrate that the insular cortex detects bodily changes brought about by fear expression to provide teaching signals that gate fear extinction performance. Collectively, our data suggest a central function of the insular cortex in a homeostatic loop between monitoring of internal affective and bodily states and the gating of fear.