The fact that exposure to severe stress leads to the development of psychiatric disorders serves as the basic rationale for animal models of stress disorders. Clinical and neuroimaging studies have shown that three brain areas involved in learning and memory--the hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex--undergo distinct structural and functional changes in individuals with stress disorders. These findings from patient studies pose several challenges for animal models of stress disorders. For instance, why does stress impair cognitive function, yet enhance fear and anxiety? Can the same stressful experience elicit contrasting patterns of plasticity in the hippocampus, amygdala and prefrontal cortex? How does even a brief exposure to traumatic stress lead to long-lasting behavioral abnormalities? Thus, animal models of stress disorders must not only capture the unique spatio-temporal features of structural and functional alterations in these brain areas, but must also provide insights into the underlying neuronal plasticity mechanisms. This Review will address some of these key questions by describing findings from animal models on how stress-induced plasticity varies across different brain regions and thereby gives rise to the debilitating emotional and cognitive symptoms of stress-related psychiatric disorders.

Episodic memories are encoded by a sparse population of hippocampal neurons. In mice, optogenetic manipulation of this memory engram established that these neurons are indispensable and inducing for memory recall. However, little is known about their in vivo activity or precise role in memory. We found that during memory encoding, only a fraction of CA1 place cells function as engram neurons, distinguished by firing repetitive bursts paced at the theta frequency. During memory recall, these neurons remained highly context specific, yet demonstrated preferential remapping of their place fields. These data demonstrate a dissociation of precise spatial coding and contextual indexing by distinct hippocampal ensembles and suggest that the hippocampal engram serves as an index of memory content.

Prolonged and severe stress leads to cognitive deficits, but facilitates emotional behaviour. Little is known about the synaptic basis for this contrast. Here, we report that in rats subjected to chronic immobilization stress, long-term potentiation (LTP) and NMDA receptor (NMDAR)-mediated synaptic responses are enhanced in principal neurons of the lateral amygdala, a brain area involved in fear memory formation. This is accompanied by electrophysiological and morphological changes consistent with the formation of ‘silent synapses’, containing only NMDARs. In parallel, chronic stress also reduces synaptic inhibition. Together, these synaptic changes would enable amygdalar neurons to undergo further experience-dependent modifications, leading to stronger fear memories. Consistent with this prediction, stressed animals exhibit enhanced conditioned fear. Hence, stress may leave its mark in the amygdala by generating new synapses with greater capacity for plasticity, thereby creating an ideal neuronal substrate for affective disorders. These findings also highlight the unique features of stress-induced plasticity in the amygdala that are strikingly different from the stress-induced impairment of structure and function in the hippocampus.

Stress and depression may share common neural plasticity mechanisms. Importantly, the development and reversal of stress-induced plasticity requires time. These temporal aspects, however, are not captured fully in the forced-swim test (FST), a behavioural model for testing antidepressant efficacy, used originally in naïve animals. The present study probed whether and how a rodent model of stress affects behaviour in the FST over time. We found that the intensity and duration of stress are critical in the development of depressive symptoms in male Wistar rats (n = 37) as tested in the FST. Chronic immobilization stress (2 h/day for 10 days) elicited a range of responses, from low to high values of immobility in the FST on day 1, and subsequent immobility on day 2 was inversely related to individual day 1 values. As a whole, chronically stressed rats did not exhibit any significant change in immobility either on day 1 or day 2 compared to control rats. However, climbing behaviour was reduced uniformly from day 1 to day 2, despite the differences in immobility. In contrast, a separate group of rats (n = 30) subjected to the same chronic stressor displayed a significant reduction in open-arm exploration in the elevated plus maze, indicative of a robust increase in anxiety-like behaviour. Furthermore, when the 10-day chronic stress paradigm was reduced to a single 2-h episode of immobilization stress, it triggered a uniform day 1 to day 2 increase in immobility, which was not persistent 10 days later. These results highlight a need for closer examination of the ways in which stress-induced modulation of behaviour in the FST may be used and interpreted in future studies aimed at exploring connections between stress and depression.