Abstract
Four experiments with rat subjects assessed conditioned analgesia evoked by a discrete visual CS repeatedly paired with a shock US. In Experiment 1, rats that received CS-US pairings followed by a hot-plate test of pain sensitivity in the presence of the CS showed significantly longer response latencies than groups of rats receiving a variety of Pavlovian control procedures, including CS and US explicitly unpaired, CS-alone, US-alone, and apparatus-alone. Experiment 2 showed that two CS-US pairings were required for the CS to evoke conditioned analgesia and that additional CS-US pairings did not augment the observed analgesia. Experiment 3 demonstrated extinction of conditioned analgesia in groups that received CS-alone presentations. Experiment 4 found that conditioned analgesia established with the present procedures was unaffected by prior administration of the opiate receptor antagonist naloxone. Experiments 1 and 3 also demonstrated a number of situations in which freezing behavior (used to index conditioned fear) could be dissociated from hot-plate response latencies (used to index conditioned analgesia). These results are discussed in terms of how associative learning processes mediate acquisition of conditioned analgesia.
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This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grant NS 18241 to A. Randich. R. T. Ross was supported by Postdoctoral Training Fellowship MH15773 from the National Institutes of Health and by a Killam postdoctoral fellowship from Dalhousie University. The naloxone was a generous gift from the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
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Ross, R.T., Randich, A. Associative aspects of conditioned analgesia evoked by a discrete CS. Animal Learning & Behavior 13, 419–431 (1985). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208019
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208019