Stress and anxiety have intertwined behavioral and neural underpinnings. These commonalities are critical for understanding each state, as well as their mutual interactions. Grasping the mechanisms underlying this bidirectional relationship will have major clinical implications for managing a wide range of psychopathologies. After briefly defining key concepts for the study of stress and anxiety in pre-clinical models, we present circuit, as well as cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in either or both stress and anxiety. First, we review studies on divergent circuits of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) underlying emotional valence processing and anxiety-like behaviors, and how norepinephrine inputs from the locus coeruleus (LC) to the BLA are responsible for acute-stress induced anxiety. We then describe recent studies revealing a new role for mitochondrial function within the nucleus accumbens (NAc), defining individual trait anxiety in rodents, and participating in the link between stress and anxiety. Next, we report findings on the impact of anxiety on reward encoding through alteration of circuit dynamic synchronicity. Finally, we present work unravelling a new role for hypothalamic corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) neurons in controlling anxiety-like and stress-induce behaviors. Altogether, the research reviewed here reveals circuits sharing subcortical nodes and underlying the processing of both stress and anxiety. Understanding the neural overlap between these two psychobiological states, might provide alternative strategies to manage disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

压力和焦虑与行为和神经基础交织在一起。这些共性对于理解每个国家及其相互之间的相互作用至关重要。掌握这种双向关系背后的机制将对管理广泛的精神病理学具有重大的临床意义。在简要定义临床前模型中压力和焦虑研究的关键概念后，我们提出了涉及压力和焦虑之一或两者的回路以及细胞和分子机制。首先，我们回顾了基底外侧杏仁核（BLA）的不同回路的研究，这些回路是情绪效价处理和焦虑样行为的基础，以及从蓝斑（LC）到 BLA 的去甲肾上腺素输入如何导致急性应激诱发的焦虑。然后，我们描述了最近的研究，这些研究揭示了伏隔核（NAc）内线粒体功能的新作用，定义了啮齿类动物的个体特质焦虑，并参与了压力和焦虑之间的联系。接下来，我们报告了焦虑通过改变回路动态同步性对奖励编码的影响的发现。最后，我们的工作揭示了下丘脑促肾上腺皮质激素释放激素（CRH）神经元在控制焦虑样和压力诱发行为中的新作用。总而言之，这里回顾的研究揭示了共享皮层下节点的回路以及压力和焦虑处理的基础。了解这两种心理生物学状态之间的神经重叠，可能会提供治疗创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）等疾病的替代策略。