Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience最新文献

Introduction: Stressful life events can trigger the initiation of cocaine use, facilitate the transition to a cocaine-use disorder (CUD), and precipitate relapse. Evidence suggests that women progress more rapidly to a CUD than men. Thus, the influence of stressful life events on CUD development may differ by sex, contributing to the enhanced vulnerability seen among females. In this work, we provide a comprehensive (non-systematic) review of clinical and preclinical studies comparing the effects of cocaine and its modulation by stress in both sexes.

Methods: We performed a search of the PubMed database (1986-2025) in which we combined the keywords "cocaine" and "stress" with "sex differences" or "female rat" or "female mice" or "women." We then read the abstracts of the search results to select potentially relevant studies, which we read in full to determine if they fulfilled our criteria and to extract the relevant information.

Results: Sex is often overlooked as a biological variable in preclinical and clinical research. The results of clinical studies indicate the existence of sex differences in the response to stress among individuals with CUD. Preclinical studies strongly suggest that female rodents are more vulnerable to developing addiction-like features than male rodents, particularly in the self-administration paradigm. Furthermore, exposure to stress appears to amplify the effects of cocaine, especially in females.

Discussion: There is growing evidence that women and female rodents are more vulnerable to the behavioral and neurochemical changes that characterize cocaine addiction. The influence of sex should be considered in research and in the selection of strategies for preventing and treating CUD, including those targeting stress reduction.

Objective: Teacher stress is a global concern with significant consequences for health, performance, and educational quality. While most studies address stress as a harmful phenomenon, emerging evidence suggests that an individual's mindset toward stress can influence both psychological and physiological outcomes. This study investigated whether a brief video-based mindset intervention could alter stress perception and modulate biological stress markers among public school teachers in Brazil.

Methods: A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 63 teachers allocated into intervention (n = 32) and control (n = 31) groups. The intervention group received an 8-days series of short educational videos developed by Stanford University's Mind and Body Lab, designed to promote a growth-oriented stress mindset. Measures included the Stress Mindset Measure (SMM), Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10), Stroop Color Task, and salivary biomarkers (cortisol and DHEA-S). Data were collected at baseline, post-intervention, and 30-days follow-up. Analyses included repeated measures ANOVA and t-tests.

Results: The intervention significantly improved stress mindset scores immediately after the intervention and at follow-up (p < 0.001; ε² = 0.664), with no change in the control group. Cortisol concentrations decreased significantly in the intervention group post-intervention (p = 0.004; ε² = 0.262), though the effect was not maintained after 30 days. No significant changes were observed in DHEA-S levels. Additionally, cognitive performance on the Stroop incongruent task improved significantly in the intervention group (p = 0.003; d = 0.565), suggesting enhanced executive functioning under stress.

Discussion: The findings support the effectiveness of a brief, low-cost intervention in shifting stress mindsets and producing acute physiological and cognitive benefits. However, the transient nature of the hormonal response underscores the need for sustained or complementary strategies to reinforce long-term stress resilience. This study highlights the value of mindset-based approaches in educational settings and their potential for improving teacher well-being through psychoneuroendocrinological mechanisms.

Introduction: Extinction learning of conditioned fear behavior has been used as a translational model to study human fear-, anxiety-, trauma-, and stressor-related disorders and their underlying neurobiology in animal models because the underlying neural processes of extinction learning are fundamental to the most effective clinical interventions for these disorders. Specifically, extinction-based prolonged exposure therapy is the first-line, gold-standard, cognitive behavioral treatment for fear-, trauma-, stressor-, and anxiety-based disorders. However, the ways that parametric differences in methodologies alter extinction learning are still not well understood.

Methods: Therefore, in the current study, we altered the number of days on which an equal number of extinction trials were presented in an extinction of conditioned fear learning-paradigm. As part of this paradigm, we employed fear-potentiated startle as a primary outcome measure of fear responses in adult, male rats. One group received 120 massed extinction trials in 1 day, a second group received 120 extinction trials across 2 days, and a final group received 120 extinction trials spaced across 4 days. We hypothesized that a greater number of days of extinction training would lead to improved extinction retention.

Results: We found minimal differences between groups on the final test of extinction retention, although increased fear behaviors were observed at the start of the second day of extinction training in the 2-day group.

Discussion: These findings have implications with respect to the flexibility of fear extinction methodologies employed as well as to how data generated from chosen paradigms is interpreted.

In animal models, reflexive responses to noxious stimuli (e.g., paw withdrawal in von Frey, Hargreaves, or cold plantar tests) are largely spinal reflexes and their quantitative measures (latency or threshold) may not directly reflect clinically relevant pain perception as assessed by human quantitative sensory testing, which captures both conscious sensory and affective components of pain as a subjective experience. This study aims to develop a complementary behavioral testing strategy for rapidly and automatically detecting rodents' thermal responses under different pain conditions without human interference. A device is engineered to create a linear thermal gradient from 4 °C to 58 °C along a long aluminum floor of four equal-size corridors, each having a dimension of 137 cm × 10 cm × 22 cm (L × W × H) and allowing four freely roaming rodents to be simultaneously evaluated to increase the throughput of in vivo pain testing. Animal behaviors influenced by the temperature gradient are recorded by a camera and analyzed using ANY-Maze. The duration of data collection is investigated, showing that the data collected in as short as 10 min can adequately capture thermal preferences of mice along the temperature gradient. Animal behaviors reveal differences in thermal nociception between male and female mice, capture counterintuitive changes in nociceptive thermal avoidance in the absence and presence of inflammatory pain, and show analgesic effects of morphine (10 mg/kg subcutaneously) as well as its stimulation of hyperactive locomotion. The sensitivity, reliability, and efficiency of the new thermal gradient test will not only help mechanistic investigations of various thermal sensing receptors but also enable high-throughput in vivo pain evaluation and analgesic drug screening for developing new treatments for pain management.

Introduction: This study investigated whether a single morning session of bright light exposure modulates alertness, cognition, mood, and EEG activity in well-rested and partially sleep-deprived adolescents.

Methods: Forty-seven subjects (15-21 years) were assigned to a well-rested (8 h sleep; 9 men, 15 women) or a sleep-deprived group (4 h sleep; 11 men, 12 women). All underwent 30 min of morning bright light exposure, with EEG, cognitive testing, and ratings of sleepiness and affect conducted pre- and post-intervention. Behavioral and electrophysiological changes were compared within and between groups. Associations between changes in EEG activity and behavioral outcomes were explored using correlation analyses.

Results: Bright light significantly reduced negative affect and improved Digit Span Forward task performance. No changes were observed in positive affect, subjective sleepiness, or Digit Span Backward scores. EEG analysis revealed decreased delta activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and increased beta activity in the right insula and fronto-parietal regions. Behavioral and EEG effects were similar across groups; however, only in the sleep-deprived group changes in beta activity significantly correlated with reduced negative affect.

Discussion: These results suggest that bright light may acutely enhance emotional state, cognitive performance, and cortical arousal in adolescents. The link between beta activity and affective improvement under sleep deprivation suggests a potential mechanism by which light supports emotional regulation.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnbeh.2025.1564676.].

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) are commonly used to test the impact of pharmacological and toxicological compounds. Larval zebrafish are extensively used because of high throughput procedures allowing simultaneous behavioural measurement in 24-, 48-, or 96-well plates. Often solvents are used as a vehicle for poorly soluble or insoluble compounds, however, the impact of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), methanol, and ethanol after acute administration is not well characterized. Here we investigated the impact of 30-min exposures of DMSO, methanol, and ethanol (0.01%, 0.1%, and 1.0% vol/vol) on 5-day old larval zebrafish locomotion and startle responses. We found no effect of DMSO on distance moved and thigmotaxis in a spontaneous swimming test, and no effect on dark-, light-, or tap-startle responses compared to controls. Methanol and ethanol, both at 1.0% increased the distance moved, and ethanol decreased the dark startle response at 1.0%. Neither ethanol nor methanol had any impact on time in thigmotaxis zone, light- or tap-startle responses. Results from this study suggest that with acute exposure to experimental compounds requiring a solvent, the least impact on behaviour would occur with DMSO, followed by methanol, then ethanol.

Introduction: A growing body of evidence shows that paternal care has long-lasting impacts on the social behavior of offspring, both in humans and other mammalian biparental species. However, fatherhood has historically been understudied and the dynamics of parental care adjustments based on their partner's behavior remain unclear. This study investigates how individuals adjust parenting behavior based on their experience as part of a parenting dyad in the biparental prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster).

Methods: We investigated how prairie voles learn to be parents by observing how their parental care effort changes over two consecutive litters. The first litter represents a naive context while the second litter represents an experienced context.

Results: On average, dyads provided 9% more care in the naive context than in the experienced context. Experienced mothers, as a group, tended to reduce care significantly, while experienced fathers did not. By comparing the correlation between mother and father care in the naive versus experienced contexts, we found that parental care became more negatively correlated following experience. Finally, we investigated whether the difference in the amount of care provided by each parent in the dyad in the naive context drives the observed changes in experienced parental behavior, and found that these differences significantly predict the likelihood of reducing or increasing parental care effort in the experienced context for both the male and female partner.

Conclusion: Our results indicate that individual care behavior is adjusted based on the parenting effort of the dyadic partner. When only group-wise analyses are conducted, it appears that only mothers reduce care based on experience. However, through a dyadic-based analysis, we find that a larger difference in care between the two parents in the naive context corresponds to greater shifts in care by both parents in the experienced context. In sum, two patterns emerge in experienced parents that appear to improve parental care efficiency: (1) parents take on a more compensatory pattern of caregiving over time and (2) are able to adapt to initial differences in care such that investments in care become more balanced between mothers and fathers over time.

Introduction: Neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) provide life-saving care for preterm and sick neonates, but many medical procedures are painful and stress-inducing. Even a routine NICU procedure, such as the "heel lancing" blood-draw procedure, is an acutely painful, repetitive manipulation that has lasting negative impacts on pain perception and anxiety responses. The intersection of nociception and negative affect occurs in a brain region called the central nucleus of the amygdala (CeA), and neurons expressing corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) have been implicated in studies of both anxiety and pain.

Methods: Using a two-hit model of trauma-induced pain vulnerability-where repetitive needle prickings occur during the first week of life ("our NICU model"), followed by a second stressor (e.g., fear conditioning) during adolescence-our lab has observed a mechanical hypersensitivity in rats that endured our NICU model that manifests only after fear conditioning. We have also observed changes to expression and activation of CeA-CRF neurons after the NICU-like experience with an acute increase followed by a lasting reduction in the number of CRF cells in the right CeA of adolescent male rats. However, the relationship between these changes and the observed behavioral outcomes remains unclear, as does the function of the remaining CRF cell population. We hypothesize that the remaining population of CRF-expressing CeA neurons are functionally altered by early life pain and stress and primed to respond more readily, such that vulnerability to stress-induced hypersensitivity is increased.

Results: Through chemogenetic inhibition of the amygdala, or specifically CeA-CRF neurons, we demonstrate that development of stress-induced mechanical hypersensitivity after our NICU model is completely reversed through silencing the amygdala. Inhibiting only CeA-CRF neurons during fear conditioning led to a partial reversal of the hypersensitivity, suggesting that other populations of cells also play critical roles. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the NICU-like experience results in a lasting hyperexcitability of CeA-CRF neurons during adolescence, confirming that this population is affected by the early life manipulations.

Discussion: In all, this study suggests that CeA-CRF neurons may have pro-nociceptive properties that are exacerbated by early life pain and result in maladaptive responding to subsequent traumatic events.