Glutamate-modulating agents are of increasing interest in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Current pharmacotherapies for OCD target the serotonin and dopamine systems, and are limited in efficacy. N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is an over-the-counter amino…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Noradrenergic receptor modulation influences the acoustic parameters of pro-social rat ultrasonic vocalizations.
Rats produce high rates of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) in social situations; these vocalizations are influenced by multiple neurotransmitter systems. Norepinephrine (NE) plays a significant role in vocalization biology; however, the contribution of…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Chronic nicotine exposure in preadolescence enhances later spontaneous recovery of fear memory.
Preadolescent mice have been shown to be differentially susceptible to the effects of both acute and chronic nicotine exposure on contextual fear learning relative to adults. For this study, we tested the effects of chronic nicotine exposure in preadol…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Pigeons consistently prefer easy over harder access to food: No reversal after direct dopaminergic stimulation.
Many studies show that animals may prefer earned over free food—a phenomenon referred to as “contrafreeloading.” In rodents, dopamine—which is involved in incentive motivation and effort—facilitates the occurrence of such a preference. Here, we investi…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Orexin neurons couple neural systems mediating fluid balance with motivation-related circuits.
During extracellular dehydration, neural systems that sense deficits in body fluid homeostasis operate in tandem with those that mediate motivation and reward in order to promote ingestive behaviors that restore fluid balance. We hypothesized that hypo…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Timing of cyclic estradiol treatment differentially affects cognition in aged female rhesus monkeys.
Some evidence suggests that there may be a limited “window of opportunity” for beneficial effects of hormone therapy after menopause in women. We tested whether the timing of cyclic estradiol (E2) treatment impacted its effect on cognitive function in …
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Effects of light at night on laboratory animals and research outcomes.
Light has substantial influences on the physiology and behavior of most laboratory animals. As such, lighting conditions within animal rooms are potentially significant and often underappreciated variables within experiments. Disruption of the light/da…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Estradiol treatment in a nonhuman primate model of menopause preserves affective reactivity.
Human affective life changes with age, becoming more positive and less negative in later life. This change occurs even as aging leads to declines in health and cognitive outcomes. Despite these well-documented effects in humans, the extent to which aff…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Preventing the return of fear memories with postretrieval extinction: A human study using a burst of white noise as an aversive stimulus.
Standard extinction procedures seem to imply an inhibition of the fear response, but not a modification of the original fear-memory trace, which remains intact (Bouton, 2002, 2004). Typically, the behavioral procedure used to modify this trace is the s…
Article Correctness Is Author's Responsibility: Early life stress impairs contextual threat expression in female, but not male, mice.
Early life stress (ELS) is associated with altered processing of threat signals, and increased lifetime risk of anxiety and affective pathology, disorders that disproportionately affect females. We tested the impact of a limited bedding paradigm of ELS…
