Behavioural brain research
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The fundamental cognitive-control function of inhibitory control over motor behavior has been extensively investigated using the Stop-signal task. The critical behavioral parameter describing stopping efficacy is the Stop-signal response time (SSRT), and correlations with estimates of this parameter are commonly used to establish that other variables (e.g., other behavioral measures or brain activity measures) are closely related to inhibitory motor control. Recently, however, it has been argued that SSRT estimates can be strongly distorted if participants strategically slow down their responses over the course of the experiment, resulting in the SSRT no longer reliably representing response-inhibition efficacy. ⋯ Concerning brain-behavior correlations, only the left anterior insula was found to be significantly correlated with the SSRT within the set of areas tested here. Interestingly, this brain-behavior correlation differed little for the different SSRT-estimation procedures. In sum, the current results highlight that different SSRT-estimation procedures can strongly influence the distribution of SSRT values across subjects, which in turn can ramify into correlational analyses with other parameters.
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For many patients, chronic pain is often accompanied, and sometimes amplified, by co-morbidities such as anxiety and depression. Although it represents important challenges, the establishment of appropriate preclinical behavioral models contributes to drug development for treating chronic inflammatory pain and associated psychopathologies. In this study, we investigated whether rats experiencing persistent inflammatory pain induced by intraplantar injection of complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA) developed anxiety-like behaviors, and whether clinically used analgesic and anxiolytic drugs were able to reverse CFA-induced anxiety-related phenotypes. ⋯ Our results also reveal that in CFA-treated rats, acute administration of morphine (3mg/kg, s.c.) abolished tactile allodynia and anxiety-like behaviors, whereas acute administration of diazepam (1mg/kg, s.c) solely reversed anxiety-like behaviors. Therefore, pharmacological treatment of anxiety-like behaviors induced by chronic inflammatory pain can be objectively evaluated using multiple behavioral tests. Such a model could help identify/validate alternative potential targets that influence pain and cognitive dimensions of anxiety.