Behavioural responses to manipulation of central monoamine sytems in the rat

Abstract

la psychiatric illnesses, particularly in the affective disorders, and to a lesser extent in the schizophrenias, there are marked deviations from normal behaviour which have components which may be described, in psychological terms as aberrant, stereotyped, activity and as abnormalities in locomotor and exploratory drives. A hypothesis that a disturbance in one or more of the dopaminergic, noradrenergic or serotonergic neuronal systems in the brain may play a role in psychiatric illness has engendered much research into the functional roles of these systems in animals and man. The published work has been reviewed particularly that in relation to the behavioural abnormalities which may be induced in lower animals such as the rat and which appear to mimic to some degree the abnormalities in behaviours seen in psychiatric illness in man. The experimental work presented in this thesis is a further contribution to this investigation using an animal model. Previous reports in the literature had, when considered together, indicated that in animals dopaminergic systems played a major role in the mediation of all three types of behaviour monitored - exploratory, locomotor and stereotyped behaviour, with lesser roles being assigned to noradrenergic and serotonergic systems. Individually, the previous studies tended to depend on visual observation of one, or at most two, of these aspects of behaviour, with exploratory behaviour receiving much less attention than stereotyped or locomotor behaviour.