Meeting Abstract

P3.188  Sunday, Jan. 6  The effects of adolescent stress on adult behavior CHABY, L.E.*; CAVIGELLI, S.A.; WANG, K.; WHITE, A.; BRAITHWAITE, V.A.; Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University; University of Pittsburg; Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University Lec5252@psu.edu

Animals that experience stressors in early life often have modified stress responsivity and associated changes in behavior as adults, leading to long term depressed-like states. Unlike early life stages, relatively less attention has been paid to exposure to stress soley during the adolescent phase, yet this is an inherently plastic time where specific neural regions in the brain undergo considerable change. Here we investigated the development of adult rat behavior in animals that experienced chronic mild stress throughout the adolescent phase. Once the rats reached maturity, both control and chronic mild stress exposed animals were returned to standard housing for 13 weeks before they were tested in successive negative contrast trials (SNC). SNC is a technique used to gauge the emotional state of frustration; it does this by quantifying the sensitivity of an animal to an unexpected downshift in reward value. For this study, the rats were trained to expect 5 minutes of access to a 32% sucrose solution daily, and their lick rate to this high level reward was monitored over 12 days. On the 13th day (and for the next 7 days) the concentration of the sucrose solution was unexpectedly decreased to a 4% sucrose solution. The lick rate of the rats exposed to chronic mild stress during adolescence dropped almost 3 times more than control rats, indicating that they more easily gave up this challenge. This suggests that exposure to mild but prolonged stress during adolescence significantly increased the susceptibility to frustration and impairs coping ability in these animals.