Sex differences in adult Wistar rats in the voluntary consumption of ethanol after pre-exposure to ethanol-induced flavor avoidance learning.

Vulnerability to ethanol abuse may be a function of the balance between the opposing (aversive and rewarding) motivational effects of the drug. The study of these effects is particularly important for understanding alcohol addiction. Research in this field seems to point out that ethanol effects are determined by a set of internal factors (sex, ethanol intake history, etc.

c-Fos positive nucleus reveals that contextual specificity of latent inhibition is dependent of insular cortex.

The present study analyzed the functional activity of granular and agranular insular cortices in contextual specificity of latent inhibition using a conditioned taste aversion paradigm. c-Fos immunolabeling was examined in insular cortex in preexposed and no preexposed groups under similar and different context conditions. Result showed that the exposition to a novel taste increased c-fos activity in insular cortex.

One-way avoidance learning in female inbred Roman high- and low-avoidance rats: effects of bilateral electrolytic central amygdala lesions.

Female inbred Roman high- (RHA-I) and low- (RLA-I) avoidance rats show differences in one-way avoidance learning only when the task implies a highly aversive situation (1s in the "non-shock"-associated safe compartment, as opposed to 30s). These between-strain differences seem to depend on strain differences in emotionality, given that: (i) they are abolished by IP administration of the GABAergic anxiolytic diazepam (Torres et al. [32]) and (ii) avoidance responding appears to correlate with cellular density in the basolateral amygdala (Gómez et al.

Impulsivity characterization in the Roman high- and low-avoidance rat strains: behavioral and neurochemical differences.

The selective breeding of Roman high- (RHA) and low-avoidance (RLA) rats for rapid vs extremely poor acquisition of active avoidance behavior in a shuttle-box has generated two phenotypes with different emotional and motivational profiles. The phenotypic traits of the Roman rat lines/strains (outbred or inbred, respectively) include differences in sensation/novelty seeking, anxiety/fearfulness, stress responsivity, and susceptibility to addictive substances. We designed this study to characterize differences between the inbred RHA-I and RLA-I strains in the impulsivity trait by evaluating different aspects of the multifaceted nature of impulsive behaviors using two different models of impulsivity, the delay-discounting task and five-choice serial reaction time (5-CSRT) task.

Consummatory successive negative and anticipatory contrast effects in inbred Roman rats.

Three experiments were designed to study the performance of female inbred Roman High-(RHA-I) and Low-(RLA-I) Avoidance rats in a consummatory task in which successive negative (cSNC) and anticipatory contrast (cANC) effects were induced by changing the concentration of the sucrose solution used as reward. Both RHA-I and RLA-I rats showed a significant suppression of drinking (cSNC) when they were exposed to 32% sucrose in preshift phase and 4% in postshift phase, in comparison to RHA-I and RLA-I control groups always exposed to 4% sucrose (Experiment 1). By contrast, when the preshift-postshift reward discrepancy was reduced from 32-4 to 22-4 in Experiment 2, both strains showed a suppression of fluid intake on the first postshift trial, whereas only the more emotional RLA-I strain maintained this suppression on subsequent days.