Persistent conditioned place preference to aggression experience in adult male sexually‐experienced CD‐1 mice

• Published in: Genes, brain and behavior Vol. 16; no. 1; pp. 44 - 55
• Main Authors: Golden, S. A., Aleyasin, H., Heins, R., Flanigan, M., Heshmati, M., Takahashi, A., Russo, S. J., Shaham, Y.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01-01-2017; John Wiley & Sons, Inc
• Subjects: Aggression; Aggressive behavior; Aggressiveness; Animals; CD‐1; conditioned place preference; Conditioning, Psychological; D1‐Cre; D2‐Cre; Food; food self‐administration; Footshock; Hybridization, Genetic; Male; Mice; Mice, Inbred C57BL; Phenotype; Place preference conditioning; Punishment; Reinforcement, Psychology; reward; Rodents; Sexual Behavior, Animal; Spatial Behavior; Transgenic animals; Transgenic mice; reward; punishment; Aggression; conditioned place preference; D1-Cre; D2-Cre; CD-1; food self-administration; mice
• ISSN: 1601-1848; 1601-183X
• DOI: 10.1111/gbb.12310

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.
Persistent conditioned place preference to aggression experience in adult male sexually‐experienced CD‐1 mice.