Neuroethological studies of fear, anxiety, and risky decision-making in rodents and humans

•Neuroscience has ignored the natural conditions under which anti-predation evolved.•Survival circuits underlie dynamic threat reactions and decisions-making actions.•Threat signals flow through corticolimbic to midbrain circuits.•Ethologically inspired paradigms provide an insightful window into fear and anxiety.

Prey are relentlessly faced with a series of survival problems to solve. One enduring problem is predation, where the prey's answers rely on the complex interaction between actions cultivated during its life course and defense reactions passed down by descendants. To understand the proximate neural responses to analogous threats, affective neuroscientists have favored well-controlled associative learning paradigms, yet researchers are now creating semi-realistic environments that examine the dynamic flow of decision-making and escape calculations that mimic the prey's real world choices. In the context of research from the field of ethology and behavioral ecology, we review some of the recent literature in rodent and human neuroscience and discuss how these studies have the potential to provide new insights into the behavioral expression, computations, and the neural circuits that underlie healthy and pathological fear and anxiety.