Behavioral Research Blog

The world's population is ageing. International dementia and Alzheimer organizations state that there are an estimated 36 million people worldwide with dementia.

Penke and Asendorpf (2008) used a large online study and a detailed behavioral assessment to investigate sociosexual behavior.

As a consumer, you have to make many different choices. Which peanut butter do you want? Which potato chips are the healthy choice?

When a baby is born prematurely, this baby and his or her parents often experience a rough start. You can think about eating problems, high risk of infection, or even anemia.

When it comes to measuring our emotional responses to food items, medical treatment, or works of art, our behavior does not always paint the whole picture.

In daily practice, it can be difficult to establish a long-term change in behavior. Most of the time, people are not aware of their behavior.

Recent scientific research provides more and more understanding of behavioral challenges children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) face.

Quality of parent-child interaction is one of the major predictors of emotional and social development of children, which makes parent-child interaction an important focus of child development research.

In general, researchers choose the methods and techniques that best suit their research objectives. That’s no different when researching doctor-patient communication or any other clinical interview setting.

Patterns in behavior are everywhere around us. Think about the sequence of behavior when you do the laundry, get ready in the morning, play a game of soccer, or drive your car to work.

In the beginning of this year I wrote a post about the Morris water maze test, a popular and well-validated paradigm to study learning and memory in rats and mice.

Zebrafish are not the first species one might think of as being exposed to alcohol in their natural environment.

Behavior of laboratory rodents is often studied in well-controlled, simple experiments, in an environment that is fundamentally different from the animal’s home cage.

A great example of optogenetics in behavioral studies is the work of Dr. Kravitz and Dr. Kreitzer at the Kreitzer lab (currently, Kravitz works at the NIDDK in Bethesda). Let me tell you about it.

Last year the news was hitting the internet: The Zwiebel lab (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA) may have found a new bug repellant that is stronger than DEET.

Brains are complicated. We all know that. Like an entangled bunch of wires. Still, over the years, neuroscientists have been able to map out several brain regions and their functions in behavior and physiology.

Recognizing the lack of hands-on education, Dr. Kalueff has started organizing zebrafish behavioral neuroscience and phenotyping workshops. The workshops ran just before and after the SfN annual meeting, October 2012.

The study of behavior has proven itself to be useful in the context of ecotoxicology; the assessment of the impact of pesticides on ecology systems. It is a valuable tool in the risk assessment.

I have been reading a lot about zebrafish research lately and I thought it would be nice to share some of my favorite articles with you.

I recently wrote about other translations from rodent studies to zebrafish, such as the investigation of learning and memory and social behavior. Now it’s time to talk about anxiety and exploration.