They also agree that many intellectual abilities tend to be positively correlated, although they disagree as to just how wide-ranging these abilities
are. Beyond that, the consensus seems to diminish. At one time, intelligence research consisted primarily of statistical analyses of individual differences in scores on intelligence tests. Today, in addition to such psychometric research, intelligence is also being studied by cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, cultural psychologists, and many others. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Acknowledgments The sections on genetic and heritability studies of intelligence and on racial differences in intelligence draw on collaborations with Elena selleck inhibitor Grigorenko, Kenneth Kidd, and Steven Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Stemler.
This brief review will focus on rodent (rat and
mouse) models of anxiety disorders. There are of course models of anxiety disorders in other species, including nonhuman primates,1 but rat and mouse models are byfar the most commonly used in the current preclinical and psychiatric (genetic) research. Our aim is not to present an exhaustive view of all existing models, but to discuss Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical some conceptual issues related to these models. A first and important issue is whether various animal species can really be used as “models” of human pathologies, given the highly subjective nature of anxiety. Do animals experience something like human anxiety, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and how can we measure it, since we cannot “think like a rat”?2 We will argue that, as mentioned by many authors, the behavioral responses and brain mechanisms associated with an “anxious state” are so essential for survival that they must have
evolved very early in the development of Adenosine mammalian species and are probably highly conserved—the phylogenetic argument.3 In view of the relationship between anxiety and coping styles, or of the pivotal role of fear-conditioning processes (to be developed in the following sections), it is not unlikely that some form of anxiety exists in other vertebrate classes or lower organisms; even primitive ones have a capacity to detect danger and react to threat.4 This may offer new opportunities to design as-yet unexpected models.5-8 The probability of finding the various emotional responses and “logistic systems” involved in anxiety across phyla is discussed in a recent review.