Abstract
Reward availability and the potential for danger or safety potently regulates emotion. Despite women being more likely than men to develop emotion dysregulation disorders, there are few studies investigating fear, safety and reward regulation in females. Here, we show that female Long Evans rats do not suppress conditioned freezing in the presence of a safety cue, nor do they extinguish their freezing response, whereas males do both. Females did show evidence of conditioned inhibition of darting, however. Females were also more reward responsive during the reward cue until the first footshock exposure, at which point there were no sex differences in reward seeking to the reward cue. In summary, females showed a significantly different behavioral profile than males in a task that tests the ability to discriminate among fear, safety and reward cues. This paradigm offers a great opportunity to test for mechanisms that are generating these behavioral sex differences.