Thesiss

Anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) are synthetic derivatives of testosterone used by over half a million adolescents in the US for their tissue-building potency and performance enhancing effects. Recent studies show AAS use is increasing among teenagers. AAS have behavioral effe…

Stress affects virtually all organisms and can result in both physiological and behavioral changes. Conditioned defeat in Syrian hamsters is a model of stress-induced behavioral plasticity that occurs in a social context. In this model, hamsters are defeated by a larger, more ag…

Previous research described sex differences in pheromonal stimulation of the chemosensory pathway that mediates copulatory behavior in Syrian hamsters. The goal of the studies described herein is to further characterize this pathway in males and females in an attempt to identify…

Increased exploration, risk-taking and reward-seeking are the hallmarks of adolescence. These and related behaviors prepare the young to transition from the parent’s nest to independent living. Adolescence is also a period of heightened structural and functional brain reorganiza…

Decades of research have shown long-term effects of early caregiving adversity on stress physiology and limbic brain regions, two key biological systems that are implicated in risk for internalizing disorders. Although stress physiology and limbic brain structure undergo signifi…

Can the brain register the emotional valence of brief exposures of complex natural stimuli under conditions of forward and backward masking, and under conditions of attentional competition between foveal and peripheral stimuli? To address this question, three experiments were co…