Postnatal Aversive Experience Impairs Sensitivity to Natural Rewards and Increases Susceptibility to Negative Events in Adult Life
2013
Evidence shows that maternal care and postnatal traumatic events
can exert powerful effects on brain circuitry development but little
is known about the impact of early postnatal experiences on processing
of rewarding and aversive stimuli related to the medial prefrontal
cortex (mpFC) function in adult life. In this study, the
unstable maternal environment induced by repeated cross-fostering
(RCF) impaired palatable food conditioned place preference and disrupted
the natural preference for sweetened fluids in the saccharin
preference test. By contrast, RCF increased sensitivity to conditioned
place aversion (CPA) and enhanced immobility in the
forced swimming test. Intracerebral microdialysis data showed that
the RCF prevents mpFC dopamine (DA) outflow regardless of
exposure to rewarding or aversive stimuli, whereas it induces a
strong and sustained prefrontal norepinephrine (NE) release in
response to different aversive experiences. Moreover, the selective
mpFC NE depletion abolished CPA, thus indicating that prefrontal
NE is required for motivational salience attribution to aversionrelated
stimuli. These findings demonstrate that an unstable
maternal environment impairs the natural propensity to seek pleasurable
sources of reward, enhances sensitivity to negative events
in adult life, blunts prefrontal DA outflow, and modulates NE release
in the reverse manner depending on the exposure to rewarding or
aversive stimuli.
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