Showing papers in "Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews in 2005"

TL;DR: The tail suspension test is a useful test for assessing the behavioural effects of antidepressant compounds and other pharmacological and genetic manipulations relevant to depression.

TL;DR: Although some inconsistencies remain, the results in general support a fetal programming hypothesis and programs to reduce maternal stress in pregnancy are warranted.

TL;DR: A physiological model of performance in the rat FST has been proposed involving the regulation of 5-HT transmission by corticotropin releasing factor (CRF), which is based on extensive evaluation of agonists and antagonists of individual 5- HT receptor subtypes.

TL;DR: A conceptual framework is presented showing that Hawks, due to inefficient management of mediators of allostasis, are more likely to be violent, to develop impulse control disorders, hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias, sudden death, atypical depression, chronic fatigue states and inflammation.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a review of the use of the EPM as a post-hoc test to evaluate emotionality in genetically modified rodents and identify and control of major sources of variability in this test.

TL;DR: It is concluded that maternal androgen deposition in avian eggs provides a flexible mechanism of non-genetic inheritance, by which the mother can favour some offspring over others, and adjust their developmental trajectories to prevailing environmental conditions, producing different phenotypes.

TL;DR: It is proposed that neurocognitive indices of inhibitory functions may represent a useful heuristic in the search for endophenotypes in OCD, and that failures in cognitive and behavioural inhibitory processes appear to underlie many of the symptoms and neuroc cognitive findings.

TL;DR: A small number of recent studies have suggested that skin and fur-derived predator odors may have a more profound lasting effect on prey species than those derived from urine or feces.

TL;DR: The nature of learned helplessness, as well as the role of the dorsal raphe nucleus, serotonin, and corticotropin-releasing hormone in mediating the behavioral effects of uncontrollable stressors, are discussed.

TL;DR: The olfactory bulbectomized rat is not only a model for detecting antidepressant activity but also one for exploring the inter-relationships between these systems that are also dysfunctional in patients with major depression.

TL;DR: It is possible to design non-linguistic cognitive measures of animal emotion that may be especially informative in offering new methods for assessing emotional valence, discriminating same-valenced emotion of different types, identifying phenotypes with a cognitive predisposition to develop affective disorders, and perhaps shedding light on the issue of conscious emotional experiences in animals.

TL;DR: Although the precise mechanism of action of VNS is still unknown, the search for the mechanism has the potential to lend new insight into the neuropathology of depression, a review of the pre-clinical and clinical literature relating to VNS concludes.

TL;DR: The results show a surprising similarity between the great tit and a rodent model, suggesting a fundamental principle in the organization of behavioral profiles and suggest variation in selection pressure in time and space and assortative mating are plausible mechanisms accounting for the maintenance of different behavioral profiles within the same population.

TL;DR: This review provides caveats concerning etiologically valid animal models of depression, focusing on characteristics of the depressive subtype being examined, and factors that contribute to the interindividual behavioral variability frequently evident in stressor-related behavioral paradigms.

TL;DR: The evidence for human sex-typed behavior is influenced by sex hormones that are present during prenatal development is reviewed, and suggestions for interpreting and conducting studies of the behavioral effects of prenatal hormones are suggested.

TL;DR: Pregnant mouse dams receiving a single exposure to the cytokine-releasing agent, PolyI:C, on gestation day 9 produced offspring that subsequently exhibited multiple schizophrenia-related behavioural deficits in adulthood, in comparison to offspring from vehicle injected or non-injected control dams, leading to a conclusion that prenatal Polyi:C treatment represents one of the most powerful environmental-developmental models of schizophrenia to date.

TL;DR: The reliability of male advantages in spatial working and reference memory for rats across strains, protocols, ages and rearing environments is established and an important species dichotomy between rats and mice should be considered when transitioning from rat to mouse models.

TL;DR: An overview of the explanations for elevated rates of smoking in schizophrenia is presented, with particular emphasis on the theories relating this behaviour to sensory gating and cognitive deficits in this disorder that have been viewed as major support for the self-medication hypotheses.

TL;DR: The value of sickness behavior as an animal model of major depressive disorder is limited, so that care should be taken in extrapolating results from the model to the human disorder, but it is concluded that immune activation and cytokines may be involved in depressive symptoms in some patients.

TL;DR: Control over these adaptive responses can be achieved by manipulating the locus of asymmetric exercise during exposure (muscle potentiation), the similarity between exposure and post-exposure tasks (calibration, and the timing of visual feedback availability during exposure)

TL;DR: The NIH paradigm provides a promising new model for investigations into the neurobiology underlying the antidepressant response, and a newly revised hyponeophagia paradigm is presented, called the novelty-induced hypophagía (NIH) test, which attempts to maximize the predictive validity and practicality of the test.

TL;DR: A model in which pre-exposure to a stressor of repeated footshock enhances conditional fear responding to a single context-shock pairing is developed, which predicts why in PTSD patients, mild stressors cause reactions more appropriate for the original traumatic stressor and why new fears are so readily formed in these patients.

TL;DR: Some of the evidence-positive and negative-that neglect-like environments in rat pups and monkey infants lead to long-term, depression-like behavioural traits of reduced motivation for reward and impaired coping with adversity, and to altered activity in relevant physiological homeostatic systems are reviewed.

TL;DR: The general conclusion is that physiological stress reactivity appears to be dampened during pregnancy, Nonetheless, the physiological responses to laboratory challenges are clearly present and display enough inter-individual variability to enable the study of links between responsivity patterns, psychosocial variables, fetal behavior, pregnancy outcome and offspring development.

TL;DR: The FSL rat model of depression exhibits some behavioral, neurochemical, and pharmacological features that have been reported in depressed individuals and has been very effective in detecting antidepressants.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that early experiences trigger immediate changes in the stress system that may permanently alter brain and behaviour.

TL;DR: This review presents the neurophysiological concept of functional connectivity, which utilizes in a plausible manner the notion of neural assemblies, as well as local and large-scale levels of description.

TL;DR: The results are indicative of a large dynamic range in the adaptive plasticity of the brain, allowing the animals to adapt behaviorally to the previously occurred stressful situation with the progression of time.

TL;DR: The use of rodent models of early life emotional experience to study issues in the laboratory and some of the pertinent findings demonstrate the pervasive influence of maternal and social environments during sensitive developmental periods and reveal how genetic factors determine how these early life experiences can shape brain and behavior throughout life.

TL;DR: Rats exposed to a large cat odor containing cloth exhibit an increase in fear behavior, particularly freezing, which remains at high levels in habituation tests administered over a period of 7 days, and the large cloth also induces a long-lasting increase in avoidance behavior during repeated habituation and extinction tests.