Interaction of stress and alcohol on discriminating fear from safety and reward in male and female rats.

Rationale: Stressful events can have lasting and impactful effects on behavior, especially in terms of appropriate fear regulation and reward seeking. Our prior work in rats has shown baseline sex differences in fear expression and sucrose seeking in a discriminative reward-fear-safety conditioning task.

Objectives: The objectives of the current study were to determine how prior stress may affect alcohol consumption across a reward-fear-safety learning task, and how prior alcohol history may interact with stress to impact learning in this task.