Behavioural Pharmacology 

About: Behavioural Pharmacology is an academic journal published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Agonist & Nicotine. It has an ISSN identifier of 0955-8810. Over the lifetime, 3088 publications have been published receiving 78661 citations.

The forced swimming test as a model for core and component behavioral effects of antidepressant drugs.

Abstract: The existence of a number of classes of antidepressant drugs with diverse pharmacological effects would lead one to expect that antidepressant drugs acting through different pharmacological mechanisms should produce different behavioral effects. Animal behavioral tests used to screen antidepressant drugs do not, however, discriminate between drugs that selectively enhance serotonin or norepinephrine transmission. Several components of human depression are differently affected by drugs selectively interacting with either serotonin or norepinephrine transmission. The ideal animal model for detecting antidepressant drug effects should thus be sensitive to all antidepressant drugs and should also display multiple components that are sensitive to specific drug classes. The revised scoring of the forced swimming test corresponds to a behavioral test for antidepressant drugs that meet these criteria.

A review of delay-discounting research with humans: relations to drug use and gambling.

Abstract: Delay discounting represents the extent to which consequences, or outcomes, decrease in effectiveness to control behavior as a function of there being a delay to their occurrence. Higher rates of delay discounting are often operationalized as an index of impulsivity, and as such impulsive discounting may hold considerable potential for understanding fundamental behavioral processes associated with a range of problematic behaviors - including drug use and pathological gambling. This paper first provides a review of several assessment methods used in delay-discounting research with humans. Following, the delay-discounting literature related to drug use and gambling is reviewed. Consistencies across this literature are identified; and future research directions are discussed, which include (a) improving methods of assessment for delay discounting and (b) moving drug-use research progressively to causal interpretations, with high rates of delay discounting either predisposing to drug use or resulting from drug use itself.

Tolerance and sensitization to the behavioral effects of drugs.

Abstract: Tolerance and sensitization are relatively simple manifestations of learning and memory that refer to decreases and increases in the strength of a response to a stimulus induced by past experiences with the same or related stimuli. In the context of the study of drugs, tolerance refers to the decreased effectiveness of a given drug with repeated administration; sensitization to the increased effectiveness with repeated administration. Tolerance usually involves active adjustments or adaptation to the drug-induce disturbances of function, either within cells or within a neural system. In situations involving inter-neuronal events, these processes of adjustment may take the form of learned modifications that can be re-evoked on future occasions by events that co-occurred at the time of the original modifications. Sensitization, defined as the enhancement of a directly elicited drug effect, though adaptive, appears to represent facilitation within a system, making the effect easier to elicit on future occasions. Like tolerance, sensitization of a drug effect can become linked to the events that co-occurred when the effect was originally elicited, making it possible for sensitization to come under selective event control. This paper is concerned with factors that affect whether tolerance and/or sensitization to the various effects of drugs will develop and be expressed, and with the variety and levels of mechanisms responsible for tolerance and sensitization under different conditions of exposure.

The role of neurotrophic factors in adult hippocampal neurogenesis, antidepressant treatments and animal models of depressive-like behavior.

Abstract: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is characterized by structural and neurochemical changes in limbic structures, including the hippocampus, that regulate mood and cognitive functions. Hippocampal atrophy is observed in patients with depression and this effect is blocked or reversed by antidepressant t

Animal models of 'anxiety': where next?

Abstract: Numerous procedures have been developed to facilitate preclinical research on the behavioural pharmacology of anxiety and, as a result of this application, are often referred to as animal models of 'anxiety'. This is an unfortunate misnomer, not only because of the apparent inability of many tests to detect novel anxiolytics consistently, but also because the term implies that anxiety is a unitary emotion. Such difficulties have arisen largely as a consequence of test development strategies which, by emphasizing pharmacological (i.e. benzodiazepine) validation, have yielded models predictive of a specific type of anxiolytic activity. The present review argues that the refinement of existing tests as well as the development of new procedures requires urgent attention to the much neglected issue of behavioural validation. From an evolutionary perspective, normal human anxiety may be conceptualized as a repertoire of defence reactions tailored to meet different forms of threats, and disorders of anxiety as the inappropriate activation or exaggeration of these usually adaptive response patterns. In this context, consideration of the defensive reactions typically observed in our animal models reveals substantially greater commonality in the behavioural effects of benzodiazepine and 5-HT1A anxiolytics than would otherwise be apparent. Therefore, with the exception of the conventional plus-maze paradigm (discussed at some length), better correspondence is seen in tests involving unconditioned response to potential threat (e.g. social interaction, distress vocalizations and light/dark exploration) than in tests of conditioned fear reactions. Even within the latter grouping, however, greater commonality is seen in procedures based on reactions to proximal threat (e.g. freezing, startle, ultrasonic vocalizations, burying) than those involving reactions to distal threat (e.g. avoidance/flight). Significantly, very similar findings have been reported in tests specifically designed to study defensive reactions (e.g. rat and mouse defence test batteries) or which incorporate a more detailed knowledge of defence into established procedures (e.g. ethological plus-maze and defensive burying paradigms). Furthermore, recent evidence also suggests that drugs with proved clinical efficacy in panic attacks/panic disorder have reliably stronger effects on flight responses than other components of the defensive repertoire. It is concluded that a focus on defensive behaviour patterns improves test validity (predictive/face/construct), offers a more rational basis for test selection in drug development programmes, and provides a firmer theoretical framework for future methodological and therapeutic advance.