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Acute stress worsens the deficits in appetitive behaviors for social and sexual stimuli displayed by rats after long-term withdrawal from morphine

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Abstract

Rationale

Negative affective states, e.g., anhedonia, are suggested to be involved in the long-lasting motivational processes associated with relapse. Here, we investigated whether anhedonic behaviors could be elicited by an acute stress after protracted abstinence from morphine.

Objectives

The behavioral responses to natural stimuli following exposure to an acute stress were examined after 14 days of withdrawal from morphine. Male rats were pretreated with either a binge-like morphine regimen or daily saline injections for 5 days. The motivation for two natural stimuli, i.e., a social stimulus (male rat) and a sexual stimulus (estrous female rat), was measured, following exposure to an acute stress (intermittent foot shock, 0.5 mA * 0.5 s * 10 min; mean inter-shock interval 40 s), under three conditions: free approach and effort- and conflict-based approaches.

Results

Foot-shock-induced stress did not influence free-approach behavior (sniffing time) towards the social or sexual stimulus. However, in the effort-based approach task, the stressed morphine-withdrawn rats demonstrated an attenuated motivation to climb over a partition to approach the social stimulus while the stressed saline-pretreated rats showed an increased motivation to approach the social stimulus. When an aversive stimulus (pins) was introduced in order to induce an approach-avoidance conflict, both drug-withdrawn and drug-naïve groups exhibited a bimodal distribution of approach behavior towards the sexual stimulus after the stress was introduced, i.e., the majority of rats had low risky appetitive behaviors but a minority of them showed rather highly “risky” approach behavior.

Conclusions

The acute stress induces differential motivational deficits for social and sexual rewards in protracted drug-abstinent rats.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Foundation of Natural Science (grant: 31000463) to YJ Bai. D Belin is supported by the Wellcome Trust (grant: 109738/Z/15/Z), the Leverhulme Trust (grant: RPG-2016-117), and the Medical Research Council (MR/N02530X/1). XG Zheng is supported by the Knowledge Innovation Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant: KJZD-EW-L04-2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 16 Lincui Road, Chaoyang District, 100101, Beijing, China

    Yunjing Bai, Xigeng Zheng, Zhengkui Liu & Yue Zhang

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19 A Yuquan Road, Shijingshan District, 100049, Beijing, China

    Yunjing Bai, Xigeng Zheng, Zhengkui Liu & Yue Zhang

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB3 2EB, UK

    David Belin

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  1. Yunjing Bai
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  2. David Belin
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Correspondence to Yunjing Bai.

Ethics declarations

This study was approved by the International Review Board (IRB) of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and all experiments were conducted in accordance with the National Institutes of Health Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (Publication No. 85-23, revised 1985).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Bai, Y., Belin, D., Zheng, X. et al. Acute stress worsens the deficits in appetitive behaviors for social and sexual stimuli displayed by rats after long-term withdrawal from morphine. Psychopharmacology 234, 1693–1702 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-017-4571-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-017-4571-3

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