title: Persistent conditioned place preference to aggression experience in adult male sexually-experienced CD-1 mice.
abstract: We recently developed a conditioned place preference (CPP) procedure, commonly used to study rewarding drug effects, to demonstrate that dominant sexually-experienced CD-1 male mice form CPP to contexts previously associated with defeating subordinate male C57BL/6J mice. Here we further characterized conditioned and unconditioned aggression behavior in CD-1 mice. In Exp. 1 we used CD-1 mice that displayed a variable spectrum of unconditioned aggressive behavior toward younger subordinate C57BL/6J intruder mice. We then trained the CD-1 mice in the CPP procedure where one context was intruder-paired, while a different context was not. We then tested for aggression CPP 1 day after training. In Exp. 2, we tested CD-1 mice for aggression CPP 1 day and 18 days after training. In Exp. 3-4, we trained the CD-1 mice to lever-press for palatable food and tested them for footshock punishment-induced suppression of food-reinforced responding. In Exp. 5, we characterized unconditioned aggression in hybrid CD-1 × C57BL/6J D1-Cre or D2-Cre F1 generation crosses. Persistent aggression CPP was observed in CD-1 mice that either immediately attacked C57BL/6J mice during all screening sessions or mice that gradually developed aggressive behavior during the screening phase. In contrast, CD-1 mice that did not attack the C57BL/6J mice during screening did not develop CPP to contexts previously paired with C57BL/6J mice. The aggressive phenotype did not predict resistance to punishment-induced suppression of food-reinforced responding. CD-1 × D1-Cre or D2-Cre F1 transgenic mice showed strong unconditioned aggression. Our study demonstrates that aggression experience causes persistent CPP and introduces transgenic mice for circuit studies of aggression.
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Neuroscience Branch, Intramural Research Program, NIDA, NIH, Baltimore, MD.
authors.forename: S A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Golden
authors.affiliation: The Friedman Brain Institute and Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Aleyasin
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Neuroscience Branch, Intramural Research Program, NIDA, NIH, Baltimore, MD.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Heins
authors.affiliation: The Friedman Brain Institute and Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Flanigan
authors.affiliation: The Friedman Brain Institute and Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Heshmati
authors.affiliation: The Friedman Brain Institute and Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.|Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, University of Tsukuba, Japan.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Takahashi
authors.affiliation: The Friedman Brain Institute and Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
authors.forename: S J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Russo
authors.affiliation: Behavioral Neuroscience Branch, Intramural Research Program, NIDA, NIH, Baltimore, MD.
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shaham
mesh_terms: D000374:Aggression; D000818:Animals; D003213:Conditioning, Psychological; D006824:Hybridization, Genetic; D008297:Male; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D010641:Phenotype; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012726:Sexual Behavior, Animal; D013037:Spatial Behavior
keywords: Aggression; CD-1; D1-Cre; D2-Cre; conditioned place preference; food self-administration; mice; punishment; reward