Abstract
Rationale
Stress may contribute to relapse to alcohol use in part by enhancing reactivity to cues previously paired with alcohol. Yet, standard models of stress-induced reinstatement generally use contingent presentations of alcohol-paired cues to reinforce instrumental behaviors, making it difficult to isolate the ability of cues to invigorate alcohol-seeking.
Objective
Here we sought to test the impact of stress on behavioral responses to alcohol-paired cues, using a model of stress-induced reinstatement of Pavlovian conditioned approach, inspired by Nadia Chaudhri’s work on context-induced reinstatement.
Methods
Long Evans rats were trained to associate one auditory cue with delivery of alcohol or sucrose and an alternative auditory cue with no reward. Following extinction training, rats were exposed to a stressor prior to being re-exposed to the cues under extinction conditions. We assessed the effects of yohimbine, intermittent footshock and olfactory cues paired with social defeat on responses to alcohol-paired cues and the effects of yohimbine on responses to sucrose-paired cues.
Results
The pharmacological stressor, yohimbine, enhanced alcohol seeking in a Pavlovian setting, but not in a cue-selective manner. Intermittent footshock and social defeat cues did not enhance alcohol seeking in this paradigm.
Conclusions
While yohimbine elicited reinstatement of reward-seeking in a Pavlovian setting, these effects may be unrelated to activation of stress systems or to interactions with specific cues.
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This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grants K99AA025384 and R00AA025384 to JMR, and a Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award to AA.
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Armstrong, A., Rosenthal, H., Stout, N. et al. Reinstatement of Pavlovian responses to alcohol cues by stress. Psychopharmacology 240, 531–545 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-022-06255-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-022-06255-w