Research on fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) has historically held that postnatal deficits result directly from prenatal alcohol exposure. Such exposure may alter infant behavior, and this in turn may affect maternal responsiveness and consequently increase the infant's risk for postnatal deficits. This study examined the effect of prenatal alcohol exposure on postnatal blood ethanol concentrations, pup development, and the ability of pups to elicit retrieval behaviors from the dam. Dams given access to a 15% ethanol solution throughout gestation and lactation showed blood ethanol concentrations of 0.1%, whereas their pups had concentrations below the sensitivity of the test. Prenatal alcohol exposure was shown to have pharmacological effects on the pup's righting reflex and nutritional effects on its rate of weight gain. Control pups were better able to elicit retrieval behavior from control and alcoholic dams than were fetally alcoholic pups. These results indicate that the condition of the pup can influence maternal responsiveness which, in turn, can influence pup development.

Information on the mental status of soldiers operating at the limits of human tolerance will be vital to their management in future deployments; it may also allow earlier intervention for conditions such as undiagnosed Gulf War illnesses and Parkinson's Disease. The Army needs a parsimonious set of neuropsychological tests that reliably identify subtle changes for: (1) early detection of individual health and military performance impairments and (2) management of occupational and deployment health risks. Testing must characterize cognitive lapses in healthy individuals faced with relevant operational stressors (i.e., anxiety, information overload, thermal strain, hypoxia, fatigue, head impact, chemical or radiation exposures, metabolic challenges). This effort must also explore the neuropsychological methods in militarily relevant conditions to extend our understanding of relevant functional domains and how well they correspond to modes of testing. The ultimate objective is unobtrusive real-time mental status monitoring.

Study of animal domestication lacks a conceptual framework to integrate genetic and environmental factors into a coherent theory of domestic phenotypes, and reseachers have conceptually and experimentally separated the contributions of these influences. We critically examine genetic and environmental approaches to domestication and describe an alternative, developmental systems approach. In this view, domestic phenotypes are not transmitted in the genes nor contained in features of captive environments but are constructed by coaction of organic, organismic, and environmental factors during ontogeny. Thus, animals are similar or not in the expression of phenotypic traits, not because they share or lack similar genes, but because they share or lack similar developmental systems. This view of heredity and development directs attention to the animal-context transaction and includes many variables that have been omitted from analyses of domestication.

This study examined the validity of psychological measures used in screening for the U.S. Army with 885 soldiers before a 6-month peacekeeping rotation in Kosovo. Content validity and construct validity were assessed by evaluating the clinical domains, comparing clinician assessments of functioning, and assessing risk factors for screening positive. Construct validity and content validity were demonstrated. Risks, benefits, and future directions of the Army's psychological screening research program are discussed.

This study evaluated the effects of differential rearing conditions on a rat protocol for various human syndromes. Subjects were 26 male Sprague-Dawley rats, 24 days old at the start of the experiment, matched according to weight, and randomly assigned to an isolation- or group-reared (4 rats/cage) condition. At 60 days of age (273 +/- 13 g), subjects were individually housed in cages allowing access to running wheels. Weight loss was produced through voluntary exercise and restricted food access. Animals in the isolation-reared condition lost weight at a faster rate and had heavier relative thymus weights than those in the group-reared condition. Animals in both conditions ran equivalent distances and ate equivalent amounts of food. The data show that postweaning rearing conditions impact the interpretation of behavioral and physiological outcomes of animal models. The results implicate a shift from maternal regulation of pup physiological and behavioral systems to the broader social niche.