Project Summary During salient events, there are two main motivational drives that guide our behaviors. One is appetitive motivation, or the desire to approach and seek rewarding stimuli, and the other is aversive motivation, the instinct to avoid risks for punishment. Commonly, individuals will encounter scenarios in which associated signals to both appetitive and aversive stimuli are encountered together. This means that depending on which motivational drive governs their behavioral response individuals will either risk missing a reward or risk facing some type of threat. To optimize this decision-making process – particularly during conflicting situations – carefully coordinated neural circuits must integrate cognitive and emotional information into adaptive behavioral actions. Some individuals are naturally riskier than others, whereas others may be more risk-averse, and this individual variation is expected. Nonetheless, certain neuropsychiatric disorders like addiction and depression may implicate drastic motivational shifts that can result in maladaptive behaviors whereby individuals engage in excessive and even detrimental levels of reward-seeking or avoidance responses. To better understand vulnerability to these disorders and optimize treatment strategies, we must identify the neurocircuitry responsible for coordinating opposing motivational drives during conflict. I will be using a modified platform-mediated avoidance task in which mice must make the decision between mounting a platform that will ensure their safety from a signaled foot-shock or risking getting shocked for the opportunity to obtain a sucrose reward. This paradigm generates both appetitive and aversive motivational drives allowing us to measure motivational conflict in real time and probe the neurocircuits that mediate these responses. The ventral pallidum (VP) is the main output structure of the ventral striatum, and it contains a heterogeneous neuronal population capable of encoding both appetitive and aversive stimuli. How VP neurons coordinate approach and avoidance in sync during motivational conflict remains unclear. The research goals of this proposal are to 1) characterize the role of VP GABAergic (VPGABA) and glutamatergic (VPGlut) neurons in reward approach and punishment avoidance conflict, 2) identify the main target regions of VPGABA and VPGlut neurons and their neuronal markers, and 3) characterize a new neural pathway from VP responsible for driving opposing motivational responses during conflict. Altogether, this proposal will shed light on the neuronal substrates of motivational conflict and how they relate to poor-decision making in neuropsychiatric disorders.