Ace Therapeutics has many years of experience in the development of antipsychotic drugs. We are committed to providing the best behavioral testing services for models of mental illness, including conditioned fear tests. We aim to help researchers successfully achieve their research goals.

Introduction of Conditioned Fear Tests for Psychiatric Disorders

Fear conditioning has been used to study the pathogenesis of anxiety disorders. Several studies have shown that people with anxiety disorders exhibit strong fear responses during the process of acquiring conditioned fears. Furthermore, emotional responses to aversive stimuli are thought to involve the amygdala, and heightened amygdala responses to aversive emotional stimuli, such as negative emotional faces, are a prominent feature of depression. Amygdala processing of negative emotional information and fear learning can be studied in rats using fear conditioning.

Fig. 1 Tone-cued fear conditioning protocol. (Warthen DM, et al., 2011)

Conditioned Fear Testing Services

Ace Therapeutics has a full set of video tracking software and data analysis systems, and is committed to providing scientifically reliable experimental results to our customers. In the data analysis portion of the fear conditioning test, we performed a repeated measures one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) on each of the different arrest test scores to compare the degree of conditioned fear between association and association or auditory cue changes and to identify between-group differences.

Experiment Process

1. Conditioning

We placed mice in a conditioning chamber and gave paired conditioned stimuli (tone or light) and aversive unconditioned stimuli (mild electric shocks).

2. Context Test

After the conditioning session has been completed, the mice are returned to the same conditioning chamber and scored for freezing behavior to measure contextually conditioned fear (context test).

3. Cued Test

After changing the light source, background noise and other environmental information in the experimental device, or after cleaning the laboratory, observe the degree of conditioned fear of the experimental animals to the modified room.

Experimental Indexes

• Freezing state
  Duration, number of occurrences and delay of freezing state
• Immobility state
  Duration, number of occurrences and incubation period of immobility state
• Mobility state
  Duration, number of occurrences and delay of mobility state
• Other indexes
  Average speed，duration，rout and track map

Advantages of Conditioned Fear Tests

• Associative learning (classical conditioning), short- and long-term memory
• Allows assessing memory dependent on hippocampus (contextual fear conditioning) or not (cue-dependent fear conditioning)
• Standard test for phenotyping
• Conditioning task
• Does not require prior food deprivation
• Sensitive for both rats and mice

Ace Therapeutics is a global life sciences company. We have in-depth knowledge of antipsychotic drug development. We constantly challenge ourselves and strive to provide the best quality service to our customers. We provide professional one-stop service from experimental design to result analysis, if you are interested in learning more about our animal behavior testing services, please feel free to make an inquiry. We look forward to cooperating with you.

Reference

1. Warthen DM, Wiltgen BJ, Provencio I. Light enhances learned fear. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011, 108(33):13788-13793.