Publications by authors named "C S Cody"
Article Synopsis
- - Pavlovian fear conditioning research has primarily focused on male rodents and the freezing response, but new findings reveal that female rodents exhibit a different response called "darting," characterized by rapid escape movements.
- - Darting females (Darters) show less freezing than males and Non-darters, and they move faster when exposed to foot shocks, raising questions about the underlying mechanisms of these responses.
- - Further investigation showed that Darters are not more sensitive to aversive stimuli compared to Non-darters and males; instead, they might be less reactive in certain cases, highlighting the need to consider individual responses in fear conditioning studies.
Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely used tool that models associative learning in rodents. For decades the field has used predominantly male rodents and focused on a sole conditioned fear response: freezing. However, recent work from our lab and others has identified darting as a female-biased conditioned response, characterized by an escape-like movement across a fear conditioning chamber.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRodent pups use a variety of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) to facilitate maternal care. Importantly, infant USV repertoires are dependent on both the age and early life experiences of the pups. We have shown that an adverse rearing environment modeled with the maternal separation (MS) paradigm alters caregiving behavior but little is known about how pup USVs differentially elicit maternal attention.
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- Early life adversity (ELA) affects the development of corticolimbic circuitry, leading to increased glutamatergic projections from the basolateral amygdala (BLA) to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is linked to anxiety behaviors in adolescence.
- The study utilized a maternal separation (MS) model to investigate how ELA exposure enhances BLA-driven activity in the PFC and found that MS-exposed adolescents showed increased PFC activity when the BLA was stimulated.
- Despite initial decreases in anxiety-like behavior during early adolescence post-MA inhibition, the long-term effects of ELA resulted in increased BLA-PFC innervation and anxiety responses later in life, indicating that early BLA activity and receptor changes
Dysregulation of the mesolimbic reward circuitry is implicated in the pathophysiology of stress-related illnesses such as depression and anxiety. These disorders are more frequently diagnosed in females, and sex differences in the response to stress are likely to be one factor that leads to enhanced vulnerability of females. In this study, we use subchronic variable stress (SCVS), a model in which females are uniquely vulnerable to behavioral disturbances, to investigate sexually divergent mechanisms of regulation of the ventral tegmental area by stress.
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