神经生物学

In rodents, grooming is a complex and ethologically rich behavior, sensitive to stress and various genetic and pharmacological manipulations, all of which may alter its gross activity and patterning. Observational analysis of grooming activity and its microstructure may serve as a us ...

Mice spontaneously dig in many substrates in the laboratory. This behavior comes from their ancestry in the wild, where they would forage for seeds, grain, insects, and other food to be found buried in the soil or leaf litter in their natural habitat. The most convenient and sensitive way of measuring di ...

Nearly all organisms contain a circadian biological clock that is responsible for coordinating the temporal functions of many physiological systems. The circadian clock is synchronized to the earth’s day/night rhythms via changes in the intensity of light throughout the cycle. In mam ...

The ultrasonic vocalization, or isolation calling, of infant rats and mice has been studied as a measure of anxious affective state and as an early communicative behavior between a pup and mother. The protocol described herein is the typical separation testing procedure. Also included are pr ...

Among all animal models, the forced swimming test (FST) remains one of the mostly used tools for screening antidepressants with different mechanisms of action. This chapter reviews the main aspects of the FST in mice. Most of the sensitivity and variability factors that were assessed on the FST are ...

The tail-suspension test (TST) is a widely used assay for screening potential antidepressant drugs. Its advantages include being a rapid, inexpensive, highly predictive and high-throughput screening test for the acute behavioral effects of antidepressants. The test is based on the p ...

In anxiety research, the search for a model with sufficient clinical predictive validity to support the translation of animal studies on anxiolytic drugs to clinical research is challenging. The stress-induced hyperthermia (SIH) model studies the body temperature increase in resp ...

Despite overall extensive use of various chronic stress models in mice during the past decades, the reproducibility of induction of anhedonia and a depressive-like syndrome with this method remains to be dissatisfying. Generally, this is related to problems of stable induction of a depre ...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to investigate human and laboratory animal brain reward function using a variety of experimental paradigms. The most popular functional imaging technique relies on the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) contrast mech ...

The anorectic anx/anx mouse, characterized by reduced food intake, is an interesting and useful model for studies of mechanisms involved in the regulation of food intake and anorexia. The anorexia (anx) mutation arose spontaneously at the Jackson laboratory in 1976 and has now been mapped to a 0.2 ...

The brain serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, 5-HT) system is implicated in the neurobiological control of feeding and appears to be dysfunctional in patients suffering from feeding disorders, such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and obesity. Thanks to the identification and cl ...

In Western societies, the prevalence of obesity continues to increase and, hence, the need to unravel pathways and mechanisms that regulate (un)healthy food intake increases concurrently. This chapter focuses on animal models of food-anticipatory activity (FAA). In rats, FAA occurs w ...

Anorexia nervosa is a life-threatening psychiatric disorder characterized by unrelenting self-starvation, severe weight loss, and hyperactivity. Limited treatment efficacy and high rates of mortality provide strong justification for using animal models to study the biol ...

Food restriction is a defining characteristic of anorexia nervosa and a risk factor for binge pathology. Basic research related to drug addiction indicates that food restriction increases drug reward magnitude, persistence of preference for a drug-paired environment, and relapse ...

The eating disorder (ED) anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder. Although the clinical diagnosis of AN has been recognized and included in the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual since the 1980s, the cause of AN remains largely uncle ...

A number of studies have indicated a strong correlation between traumatic events during early life and the development of behavioral abnormalities later in life, including psychoemotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. Patients with eating disorders frequently exh ...

One proposed contributor to the recent surge in obesity prevalence is the increased availability of highly palatable foods coupled with the drive to consume these foods under stressful conditions. Studies of humans suggest that stress exposure promotes increased caloric intake and a ...

Human and nonhuman primates are opportunistic feeders and are prone to both obesity and binge eating when food is abundant. This chapter describes procedures for studying binge eating using a foraging model that engenders large meals in nonhuman primates. Baboons have access to food 24 h each d ...

The availability and overconsumption of palatable foods rich in fat likely contribute to the worldwide obesity epidemic. With environmental factors and genetic predisposition each playing important roles in this serious health problem, it is crucial to identify and properly treat ...

In humans, binge eating is central to the harmful effects of bulimia and binge-eating disorder (BED). The development of preclinical mouse models of binge-like eating behavior has proved to be challenging, as minor stressors can significantly inhibit food intake in this species. Herein, we p ...