Behavioral Research Blog - Anxiety

Why is it that when people drink, only small subsets of individuals develop an alcohol addiction? Steven Tran from the Gerlai Lab tells us why zebrafish are very helpful in the search for the answer to this question.

Mouse models are essential for neuroscience research. Many tests are susceptible to bias. Home cage testing provides a number of solutions.

Aggressive behavior is adaptive for most species. But how is this aggressive behavior mediated in the brain? A recent study indicates that the hippocampus is a crucial neural component in mediating social recognition.

Margaret Gruen and her colleagues recently investigated a new method to assess sound induced fear and anxiety in candidate IED-detection dogs – specifically, Labrador retrievers.

Fear is something we all know. It changes our behavior: we freeze, try to escape, or respond with aggression. Fear can also cause anxiety, which is a more complex phenomenon.

Zebrafish. This little fish is a vertebrate, and a relatively complex one. Looking at the major neurotransmitters and hormones that are investigated in neuroscience, they are as good of a model as many mammalian species.

Anxiety. It is nature’s way to keep us out of harm’s way, so it is a useful emotion. At times, though, it can also be overwhelming. For some, it gets out of control, irrational, and even disabling.

Often in animal research, animals with a certain genetic alteration are compared to a “wild-type”. One might assume that there is no differences between wild-types, but many different strains of wild-type animals are used.

It is inevitable that everyone will experience anxiety and stress at some point in their lives. Most individuals are able to move past their stress with just a little bit of effort.