Investigation of sex differences in behavioural, endocrine, and neural measures following repeated psychological stressor exposure.

Animal models of repeated stressor exposure have generally been limited to physical stressors, despite the fact that the purpose of such models is to represent repeated stress in humans, which is usually psychological in nature. The present study was undertaken to investigate the behavioural, endocrine, and neural responses to a repeated psychological stressor exposure in male and female rats. Long-Evans rats were exposed to cat odour or a control condition for 1 h each day from Day 1 to Day 22.

Periadolescent stress exposure exerts long-term effects on adult stress responding and expression of prefrontal dopamine receptors in male and female rats.

Recent research has demonstrated that experiential/environmental factors in early life can program the adult stress response in rats, and this is manifest as altered hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical activity and behavior in response to a stressor. Very little work has been devoted to investigating whether the environment during adolescence plays a similar role in modulating ongoing developmental processes and how this might affect adult stress responding. Periadolescent predator odor (PPO) exposure was used here as a naturalistic model of repeated psychological stress.