Undergraduate Honors Thesis
The experience of control mitigates stress-induced behavioral changes: Implications for cocaine taking and seeking Public Deposited
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Investigating drug-driven behaviors is invaluable to developing sufficient treatments to assist those suffering from cocaine use disorder (CUD). One poorly understood phenomenon is how stress can potentiate drug craving and serve as a barrier to maintaining drug abstinence. Animal models have poorly characterized stress-induced drug-seeking behaviors, as many stress models fail to recognize the importance of experiencing stressor controllability. It is known that uncontrollable stress potentiates drug-seeking, while stress over which an individual exhibits control produces protective and resilient behaviors even during future stressors. Because drug abuse is marked by both increased motivation to seek a drug, as well as changes in sensitivity to the negative consequences of drug intake, the present study was designed to specifically identify how controllable and uncontrollable stressors may distinctly alter these positive and negative motivational shifts. Male Sprague-Dawley rats were utilized in four behavioral experiments in which variations of cocaine self-administration assessed drug seeking and taking behaviors: (1) increased drug craving after abstinence, (2) relapse-like behaviors triggered by stress, (3) drug-taking despite aversive circumstances, and (4) drug-taking at increasing costs. Given the behavioral protection of control over stress, we hypothesized that rats possessing control would resist continued drug engagement that involved aversive consequences. Present results have offered insufficient evidence to support this hypothesis thus far: rats possessing behavioral control exhibited no significant decreases in cocaine engagement compared to control group rats or rats without behavioral protection. However, our data still provide valuable distinctions between the effects of stressor controllability on various models of cocaine seeking and taking. Continued investigations are currently being conducted within this ongoing project to further categorize these complicated effects of stressor controllability on drug-driven behaviors.
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- 2021-04-01
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- 2021-04-12
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Knopp_HonorsThesis_FINAL.pdf | 2021-04-12 | Public | Download |