Effects of oral ethanol self-administration on the inhibition of the lever-press response in rats

Effects of ethanol on Pavlovian autoshaping in rats

“…For example, in rats, lower doses of ethanol increase spontaneous motor activity (Carlsson et al 1972;Imperato and Di Chiara 1986;Waller et al 1986;Moore et al 1993;Pecins-Thompson and Peris 1993;Gingras et al 1996), running in an activity wheel (Duncan and Baez 1981;Ward and Jones 1989), and locomotion in an open-field (Sonderegger et al 1984;Prunell et al 1987;Aragon et al 1989). Lower doses of ethanol also increase consummatory responding in rats (Conger 1956;Becker and Flaherty 1982), cats (Masserman and Yum 1946), and dogs (Tamura 1963), facilitate food-directed approach responses in rats (Conger 1956;Freed 1967;Devenport et al 1981) and cats (Smart 1965), and increase instrumental lever-pressing for food reward in rats (Scarborough 1957;Holloway and Vardiman 1971;Holloway and Wansley 1973;Iso and Sakaki 1981;Pallares et al 1992) and cats (Goldman and Docter 1966). While acute presession injections of higher doses of ethanol impair Pavlovian CR performance, lower doses of ethanol facilitate the expression of eyeblink CRs and heart rate CRs in rabbits , and enhance conditioned suppression of lever-pressing in rats (Hernandez and Valentine 1989).…”

The Operant-Respondent Distinction Revisited: Toward An Understanding Of Stimulus Equivalence

“…Attempts have been made to inhibit the elicitation of conditioned emotional responses in conditioned suppression and avoidance preparations, assuming that such responses occur in the autonomic nervous system. Autonomic blocking agents, CNS tissue ablation, and drugs have all been used to block the conditioning of emotional behavior, resulting in a wide range of deviations from stereotypical operant response patterns (e.g., Dawson, Rupniak, Iversen, & Curnow, 1995;Overmier & Papini, 1986;Pallares, Nadal, & Ferre, 1992;Quartermain, Hawxhurst, Ermita, & Puente, 1993;Zielinksi, Walasek, Werka, & Wesierska, 1993). However, operant responding has not been noted to cease altogether in such preparations, as would be expected if respondently conditioned emotional responses did, in fact, mediate operant responding .…”

Extinction and spontaneous recovery of ataxic tolerance to ethanol in rats

“…As spontaneous recovery is a reliable and robust effect in many other conditioning preparations, we expected it would be likely after ataxic tolerance extinction. There are now quite a few experimental studies of the return of drug-related responses in the conditioning literature (e.g., Cunningham 1979;deWit and Stewart 1981;Pallares et al 1992;Chiamulera et al 1995;Meil and See 1996;Katner et al 1999). However, to our knowledge, none has evaluated whether Pavlovian conditioned responses to a drug such as ethanol recover after effective extinction involving the explicit CSs inherent in conditioning, and after the passage of time after extinction.…”