A Practical Guide to Evaluating Anxiety-Related Behavior in Rodents

Tests of innate fear and anxiety take advantage of the natural anxieties and interests of mice and rats. They often rely on the animals’ motivation to explore their environment as well as their apprehension towards novelty or exposure. Here we describe the technical and experimental details of five classical tests of anxiety-like behavior which are frequently applied for experiments in rats and mice. The open field test is a simple open arena, which can be used to assess anxiety as well as general locomotor activity. The light–dark box and elevated-plus maze (EMP) offer the animals a choice between nonaversive and aversive areas of an apparatus and the novelty-induced hypophagia (NIH) and social interaction tests rely on novelty-induced suppression of natural behaviors in mice and rats. Our practical guide ends with a discussion of advantages and limitations of each test. We hope that our recommendations enable an easy establishment of the behavioral paradigms and allow for a better comparability of the results between different labs.