Animal psychology

Maier NRF 1935 In defense of reasoning in rats a reply. J Comp Psychol 19 197-206 Maier NRF 1937 Reasoning in rats and human beings. Psychol Rev 44 365—377 Maier NRF, Schneirla TC 1935 Principles of animal psychology. McGraw-Hill, New York Olton DS, Samuelson RJ 1976 Remembrance of places passed spatial memory in rats. J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process 2 97-116... 

Animal psychology Bistable behaviour of an animal under stress (flight or attack)... 

Dependence and withdrawal can occur with all of the stimulants. Cocaine is one of the most strongly reinforcing drugs in self-administration paradigms in animals and also has a psychological withdrawal syndrome. A typical pattern of withdrawal includes a ravenous appetite, exhaustion, and mental depression, which may last for several days after the drug is withdrawn. Because tolerance develops quickly, abusers may take large doses, compared with those used medically, for example, as anorexiants. 

Psychological aspects of caffeine dependency, to the extent that they occur, may be due to the reinforcing effects of the drug.235-297 In fact, doses as low as 25 mg have been shown to have reinforcing properties.284 Although caffeine may not be as reinforcing as other psychostimulants,163 animal studies have shown that it does have the properties of a positive reinforcer.298... 

Mackintosh, N. The Psychology of Animal Learning. Academic Press, New York, 1974. 

Biondi, M. and Zannino, L.G., Psychological stress, neuroimmunomodulation, and susceptibility to infectious diseases in animals and man A review, Psychother. Psychosom., 66, 3, 1997. 

Rowe, C. (1999) Receiver psychology and the evolution of multicomponent signals. Anim. Behav. 58,921-931. 

Alain Schmitt, bom 1960, studied veterinary medicine and psychology at the University of Vienna and worked there for nine years on animal and human behaviour subjects. Currently, he is a psychologist at a child protection center in Vienna. 

There are many circumstances in which the only information we can develop on toxic hazards and dose-response relationships derives from experiments on laboratory animals. The example of the food additive, presented in the opening pages, is just one of many circumstances in which condition A involves animal toxicology data, and condition B involves a human population, almost always exposed at small fractions of the dose used in animals, and sometimes exposed for much larger fractions of their lifetime than the animals, and even by different routes. Extrapolations under these circumstances should cause individuals trained in the rigors of the scientific method to seek some form of psychological counsel, or, better yet, to return to the laboratory. 

In the lab, I tried to involve myself with monkeys, since they were the animals that Pribram used almost exclusively to explore the effects of brain structures on learning and memory. He liked to recount the event that triggered his attempt to bring psychology and neurosurgery together. 

For human beings, two different memory categories have been introduced. According to Schacter, imphcit (or unconscious/unaware) memory is revealed when previous experiences facilitate performance on a task that does not require conscious or intentional recollection of those experiences. Explicit memory, in turn, is revealed when the performance of a task requires conscious recollection of previous experiences. These are descriptive concepts that are primarily concerned with a person s psychological experience at the time of memory retrieval. Accordingly, the concepts of implicit and expUcit memory neither refer to nor imply the existence of two independent or separate memory systems (Schacter 1987). As these two memory categories cannot be easily appHed to the situation in animals, they will not be further considered in this chapter. 

Mackintosh NJ (1974) The psychology of animal learning. Academic Press, London Mackintosh NJ (1983) Conditioning and associative learning. Oxford University Press, New York... 

The ideal animal model for any human chnical condition must fulfill three criteria (McKinney and Bunney 1969) (1) pharmacological treatments known to be effective in patients should induce comparable effects in the animal model (predictive validity) (2) the responses or symptoms observed in patients should be the same in the animal model (face validity) (3) the imderlying rationale should be the same in both humans and animal models (construct validity). In other words, the ideal animal model for anxiety has to respond to treatment with anxiolytics such as benzodiazepines with reduced anxiety it has to display defense behavior when confronted with a threatening stimulus the mechanisms underlying anxiety as well as the psychological causes must be identical. 

Flint J, Corley R, De Fries JC, Fulker DW, Gray JA, MUler S, Collins AC (1995) A simple genetic basis for a complex psychological trait in laboratory mice. Science 269 1432-1435 Fontana DJ, Commissaris RL (1988) Effects of acute and chronic imipramine administration on conflict behavior in the rat a potential animal model for the study of panic disorder Psychopharmacology (Berl) 95 147-150... 

Landgraf R, Wigger A (2002) HAB and LAB rats as a psychological animal model of extremes in innate anxiety. Behav Genet 32 301-314... 

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