We are students engaging in an exploration of current research at Miami as part of the curriculum of BIO/PSY 159 with Dr. Joyce Fernandes. We were tasked with learning about Dr. Quinn’s research lab in the Psychology Department and communicating the findings to a wider audience. The general research area for Quinn lab’s latest publication is the effects of acute early life stress and sex differences on aversion-resistant alcohol consumption. This lab’s research question was whether an infant exposed to a single, acute stressful event would be more susceptible later in life to aversion-resistant drinking, and also whether sex influences the effects of early life stress on alcohol consumption. The research was conducted using rats as a model organism. Half of the rats received early life stress on PND 17 by 15 footshocks, while the control group received zero footshocks. Then, rats were exposed to ethanol. After a few days, some of the rats were given an ethanol and quinine mixture and their responses were recorded. It was found that females with early life stress continued to drink the ethanol and quinine mixture more often than females without early life stress, and more than their male counterparts in either the stress or no stress condition. This topic is relevant to neuroscience and psychology because the concept of drinking in spite of negative consequences is a prominent feature of alcohol use disorder. In a broader context, studying risk factors for aversion resistant drinking is important to both the prevention, prediction, and treatment of alcohol use disorder. As students in BIO/PSY 159, we can take away knowledge about the construction and organization of an experimental manuscript, and also understand to a greater extent how researchers model the real world in the lab and use animal studies to emulate real situations and produce reliable results.
Authors: Cambria Beane, Savanna Fee, Jon Sciortino, Ashley Taylor
Faculty Advisor: Joyce Fernandes, Biology
You must be logged in to post a comment.