Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 41, Issue 4, 15 February 1997, Pages 438-451
Biological Psychiatry

Original article
Changes in emotional behavior produced by long-term amygdala kindling in rats

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3223(96)00067-4Get rights and content

The effects of long-term amygdala kindling on emotional behavior were investigated. In Experiment 1, rats received 99 basolateral amygdala, central amygdala, or sham stimulations. The rats in both kindled groups displayed more resistance to capture from an open field and more open-arm activity on an elevated plus maze than did the sham control rats. In Experiment 2, rats received either 20, 60, or 100 amygdala stimulations or sham stimulations. Compared to the sham controls, the kindled rats explored less during the first 30s in a novel open field, avoided the central area of the open field, resisted being captured from the open field, and engaged in more open-arm activity on the elevated plus maze. The magnitude of these effects was greatest in the 100-stim rats and least in the 20-stim rats. Together, these results suggest that long-term amygdala kindling in rats is a useful model for studying the emotionality associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.

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      Interestingly, plasma corticosterone response to the elevated plus maze correlates highly and positively with stretched-attended behaviors suggesting that this measure may be associated with the levels of anxiety [42]. Third, while earlier studies have observed that long-term kindled rats exhibit higher levels of open arm activity in the elevated plus maze, these rats often engage in greater escape-related behaviors, such as jumping behavior, from the apparatus [21]. Although we did not measure jumping behavior in this experiment, we did notice that kindled rats displayed greater stress-related piloerection during behavioral testing suggesting that the increased activity in the elevated plus maze might be anxiety- or escape-driven.

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    This work was supported by NSERC grants to J.P.J. Pinel and D. Treit and by a Medical Research Council of Canada Scholarship to L.E. Kalynchuk.

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