Behavioral Expression of Contextual Fear in Male and Female Rats

The study of fear conditioning has led to a better understanding of fear and anxiety-based disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite the fact many of these disorders are more common in women than in men, the vast majority of work investigating fear conditioning in rodents has...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 2021-06, Vol.15, p.671017-671017
Main Authors: Russo, Amanda S., Parsons, Ryan G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Behavioral Neuroscience
context
Defecation
Defensive behavior
Experiments
fear
Fear conditioning
fear-potentiated startle
female
Females
freezing
Gender differences
Hypotheses
Laboratory animals
Males
Noise
Post traumatic stress disorder
Rodents
sex differences
Sexes
Startle response
Tonic immobility
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The study of fear conditioning has led to a better understanding of fear and anxiety-based disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite the fact many of these disorders are more common in women than in men, the vast majority of work investigating fear conditioning in rodents has been conducted in males. The goal of the work presented here was to better understand how biological sex affects contextual fear conditioning and expression. To this end, rats of both sexes were trained to fear a specific context and fear responses were measured upon re-exposure to the conditioning context. In the first experiment, male and female rats were given context fear conditioning and tested the next day during which freezing behavior was measured. In the second experiment, rats were trained and tested in a similar fashion while fear-potentiated startle and defecation were measured. We found that males showed more freezing behavior than females during a fear expression test. The expression of fear-potentiated startle did not differ between sexes, while males exhibited more defecation during a test in a novel context. These data suggest that the expression of defensive behavior differs between sexes and highlight the importance of using multiple measures of fear when comparing between sexes.
ISSN:1662-5153
1662-5153
DOI:10.3389/fnbeh.2021.671017