Dorsal hippocampus plays a causal role in context-induced reinstatement of alcohol-seeking in rats.

Drug addiction is a chronic mental disorder characterized by frequent relapses. Contextual cues associated with drug use to play a critical causal role in drug-seeking behavior. The hippocampus has been implicated in encoding drug associative memories.

Empathy for Pain: Insula Inactivation and Systemic Treatment With Midazolam Reverses the Hyperalgesia Induced by Cohabitation With a Pair in Chronic Pain Condition.

Empathy for pain is the ability to perceive and understand the pain in the other individual. Recent studies suggested that rodents have this social ability. GABAergic system has receptors in the brain structures involved in emotional processes as well as in the insular cortex.

Preliminary behavioral assessment of cagemates living with conspecifics submitted to chronic restraint stress in mice.

The capacity of rodents to recognize and respond to emotional signs from a conspecific is a valuable adaptive behavior, which provides essential skills for species survival. However, repeated exposure to aversive situations may elicit maladaptive behavioral responses in subjects that experience noxious episodes and their colony members. Previous findings by our group demonstrated that living with a subject in neuropathic pain induces anxiogenic-like behaviors and hypernociception in mice.

Mice undergoing neuropathic pain induce anxiogenic-like effects and hypernociception in cagemates.

Rodents can recognize pain-related responses in conspecifics. Therefore, cohabitation with a conspecific animal with chronic pain can potentially promote a stressful situation, which can trigger behavioral changes such as anxiety and depression and alter nociceptive responses. In this study we investigated the effect of cohabitation with a mouse undergoing sciatic nerve constriction (neuropathic pain model).