Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Rewarding Properties Of Social Defeat, Ngoc-Thao Nguyen, Mario Gil, Mark Mcdonald, Elliott Albers

DISCOVERY: Georgia State Honors College Undergraduate Research Journal

Conditioned place preference (CPP) is a classical conditioning paradigm used to evaluate the rewarding or aversive properties of a stimulus. A stimulus can be an audio, visual, or sensory prompt but can also be stimuli associated with behaviors. Environments associated with sexual and aggressive encounters can become rewarding to both male and female Syrian hamsters regardless of social status. However, we have observed that individually-housed, non-aggressive hamsters find social interaction without aggression or sexual behaviors rewarding. Therefore, we expanded upon our previous experiments using CPP to test the hypothesis that group-housed, male hamsters (n=12) can develop a preference for a …