Relationship between voluntary ethanol drinking and approach-avoidance biases in the face of motivational conflict: novel sex-dependent associations in rats.

Rationale: Aberrant approach-avoidance conflict processing may contribute to compulsive seeking that characterizes addiction. Exploration of the relationship between drugs of abuse and approach-avoidance behavior remains limited, especially with ethanol.

Objectives: To investigate the effects of voluntary ethanol consumption on approach-avoidance conflict behavior and to examine the potential approach/avoidance bias to predict drinking in male and female rats.

Female rats express a conditioned object preference for receipt of sexual stimulation.

Female rats alternately approach and avoid the male rat during copulation, potentially reflecting appetitive and aversive aspects of mating, respectively. We developed a novel classical conditioning procedure, conditioned object preference (COP), to test whether female rats show increased approach toward a conditioned stimulus associated directly with receipt of sexual stimulation. During conditioning, one scented object was paired with an appetitive stimulus and a different object plus scent was paired with a control stimulus on a separate day.