Alcohol-Preferring Rats and 22-kHz Negative-Affect Ultrasonic Vocalizations

Duvauchelle, Christine L.; Maddox, W. Todd; Reno, James M.; Thakore, Neha; Mittal, Nitish; Cormack, Lawrence K.; Bell, Richard L.; Gonzales, Rueben A.

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-809600-0.00038-x

Cited by 4 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Rodent USVs are accepted as a reflection of the animal's affective state (Brudzynski, , ; Burgdorf et al., ; Duvauchelle et al., in press). 22‐ to 28‐kHz USVs are commonly associated with an animal's negative affective status and are initiated through ascending cholinergic pathways, and frequency‐modulated 50‐ to 55‐kHz USVs are commonly associated with an animal's positive affective status and are initiated through the mesolimbic dopamine pathway (Ahrens et al., ; Brudzynski, ; Wright et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Heightened negative emotions, brought on by depression (Nurnberger et al., ), trauma (Weiss et al., ), and adversity (Chavez et al., ; Sorocco et al., ), result in a heightened risk of developing alcohol use disorders (AUDs). Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are emitted by rodents in response to internal and external stimuli and are accepted as a reflection of the animal's affective state (Brudzynski, , ; Burgdorf et al., ; Duvauchelle et al., in press). USVs occur in 2 broad categories (and frequencies) representing positive (50 to 55 kilohertz [kHz]) and negative (22 to 28 kHz) affect (Brudzynski, , ; Burgdorf et al., ) and are initiated through the mesolimbic dopamine (positive affect‐related) (Brudzynski, ; Wright et al., ) and ascending cholinergic (negative affect‐related) (Bihari et al., ; Brudzynski, ; Brudzynski et al., ) pathways.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Negative Affect‐Associated USV Acoustic Characteristics Predict Future Excessive Alcohol Drinking and Alcohol Avoidance in Male P and NP Rats

Thakore

et al. 2017

Alcoholism Clin & Exp Res

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Background Negative emotional status and adverse emotional events increase vulnerability to alcohol abuse. Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) emitted by rats are a well-established model of emotional status that can reflect positive or negative affective responses in real-time. Most USV studies assess counts, yet each USV is a multidimensional data point characterized by several acoustic characteristics that may provide insight into the neurocircuitry underlying emotional response. Methods USVs emitted from selectively bred alcohol-naïve and alcohol-experienced alcohol-preferring and non-preferring rats (P and NP rats) were recorded during 4-hr sessions on alternating days over 4 weeks. Linear mixed modeling (LMM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were applied to USV acoustic characteristics (e.g., frequency, duration, power and bandwidth) of negative (22–28 kHz) and positive (50–55 kHz) affect–related USVs. Results 100% separation between alcohol-naïve P and NP rats was achieved through a linear combination (produced by LDA) of USV acoustic characteristics of 22–28 kHz USVs, whereas poor separation (36.5%) was observed for 50–55 kHz USVs. 22–28 kHz LDA separation was high (87%) between alcohol-experienced P and NP rats, but was poor for 50–55 kHz USVs (57.3%). USV mean frequency and duration were the highest weighted characteristics in both the naïve and experienced 22–28 kHz LDA representations suggesting that alcohol experience does not alter the representations. LMM analyses of 22–28 kHz USV acoustic characteristics matched the LDA results. Poor LDA separation was observed between alcohol-naïve and experienced P rats for both 22–28 and 50–55 KHz USVs. Conclusions Advanced statistical analysis of negative affect-associated USV data predicts future behaviors of excessive alcohol drinking and alcohol avoidance in selectively bred rats. USV characteristics across rat lines reveal affect-related motivation to consume alcohol and may predict neural pathways mediating emotional response. Further characterization of these differences could delineate particular neurocircuitry and methods to ameliorate dysregulated emotional states often observed in human alcohol abusers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Negative Affect‐Associated USV Acoustic Characteristics Predict Future Excessive Alcohol Drinking and Alcohol Avoidance in Male P and NP Rats

Thakore

et al. 2017

Alcoholism Clin & Exp Res

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“…In summary, this study adds to the breadth of existing literature highlighting the utility of USVs and USV acoustic characteristics as important non-invasive, behavioral correlates of the neurological changes induced by alcohol and other drugs of abuse. The USV characteristics assessed in the current study have been previously shown to differentiate between a variety of different behavioral and physiological phenomena, including discriminating between male and female rats, high alcohol drinking (HAD-1) and low alcohol drinking (LAD-1) rats, alcohol preferring (P) rats and non-alcohol preferring (NP) rats [ 54 ]. Furthermore, we have also shown that these characteristics can be used to predict future alcohol consumption behaviors in alcohol-naïve Long–Evans rats [ 38 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spontaneous Ultrasonic Vocalization Transmission in Adult, Male Long–Evans Rats Is Age-Dependent and Sensitive to EtOH Modulation

2020

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Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are well-established markers of motivational and emotional status. Recent work from our lab has provided novel evidence for a role of USVs in models of ethanol (EtOH) use. For instance, USV acoustic characteristics can be used to accurately discriminate between rats selectively bred for high EtOH intake (e.g., alcohol-preferring (P) and high-alcohol-drinking (HAD)) versus EtOH-avoiding (e.g., alcohol-non-preferring (NP) and low-alcohol-drinking (LAD)) strains, as well as differentiate between male and female rats. In the present study we sought to explore the effect of age and alcohol availability on spontaneously emitted 50–55 kHz frequency modulated (FM) and 22–28 kHz USVs in adult, male Long–Evans rats. With the hypothesis that age and alcohol experience influence spontaneous USV emissions, we examined USV data collected across a 24-week intermittent EtOH access experiment in male Long–Evans rats. USV counts and acoustic characteristic (i.e., mean frequency, duration, bandwidth and power) data revealed distinct age-dependent phenotypes in both 50–55 kHz FM and 22–28 kHz USV transmission patterns that were modulated by EtOH exposure. These results highlight the influence of age and EtOH experience on the unique emotional phenotypes of male Long–Evans rats.

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“…The current iteration of the software outputs a sub-set of these parameters in the csv file for researchers. We fully expect the use of these parameters in USV research will become more common [29,30,43].…”

Section: Acoustilytix Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notably, even with proficient hand-scorers, the intensive manual nature of the analysis limits researchers' ability to employ the effective and nuanced experimental designs (e.g., multi-hour and/or multi-session experiments) needed to fully explore mental health and addiction related topics. In addition, with the increased predictive success of acoustic parameters of USVs over discrete call classification, tools are needed to automate this process [15,[29][30][31][32]. This represents a bottleneck for current USV researchers and a barrier to entry for other researchers as well.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustilytix™: A Web-Based Automated Ultrasonic Vocalization Scoring Platform

et al. 2021

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Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) are known to reflect emotional processing, brain neurochemistry, and brain function. Collecting and processing USV data is manual, time-intensive, and costly, creating a significant bottleneck by limiting researchers’ ability to employ fully effective and nuanced experimental designs and serving as a barrier to entry for other researchers. In this report, we provide a snapshot of the current development and testing of Acoustilytix™, a web-based automated USV scoring tool. Acoustilytix implements machine learning methodology in the USV detection and classification process and is recording-environment-agnostic. We summarize the user features identified as desirable by USV researchers and how these were implemented. These include the ability to easily upload USV files, output a list of detected USVs with associated parameters in csv format, and the ability to manually verify or modify an automatically detected call. With no user intervention or tuning, Acoustilytix achieves 93% sensitivity (a measure of how accurately Acoustilytix detects true calls) and 73% precision (a measure of how accurately Acoustilytix avoids false positives) in call detection across four unique recording environments and was superior to the popular DeepSqueak algorithm (sensitivity = 88%; precision = 41%). Future work will include integration and implementation of machine-learning-based call type classification prediction that will recommend a call type to the user for each detected call. Call classification accuracy is currently in the 71–79% accuracy range, which will continue to improve as more USV files are scored by expert scorers, providing more training data for the classification model. We also describe a recently developed feature of Acoustilytix that offers a fast and effective way to train hand-scorers using automated learning principles without the need for an expert hand-scorer to be present and is built upon a foundation of learning science. The key is that trainees are given practice classifying hundreds of calls with immediate corrective feedback based on an expert’s USV classification. We showed that this approach is highly effective with inter-rater reliability (i.e., kappa statistics) between trainees and the expert ranging from 0.30–0.75 (average = 0.55) after only 1000–2000 calls of training. We conclude with a brief discussion of future improvements to the Acoustilytix platform.

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Alcohol-Preferring Rats and 22-kHz Negative-Affect Ultrasonic Vocalizations

Cited by 4 publications

References 52 publications

Negative Affect‐Associated USV Acoustic Characteristics Predict Future Excessive Alcohol Drinking and Alcohol Avoidance in Male P and NP Rats

Negative Affect‐Associated USV Acoustic Characteristics Predict Future Excessive Alcohol Drinking and Alcohol Avoidance in Male P and NP Rats

Spontaneous Ultrasonic Vocalization Transmission in Adult, Male Long–Evans Rats Is Age-Dependent and Sensitive to EtOH Modulation

Acoustilytix™: A Web-Based Automated Ultrasonic Vocalization Scoring Platform

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