CUR D.C. page

Wheaton Psychobiology Research Team Goes to Washington!

See the winning abstract here!

This January, members of the Psychobiology Research Team composed and submitted a group proposal to the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) for their "Undergraduate Posters on the Hill" session, part of CUR's annual "April Dialogue" in Washington, D.C.

The Council on Undergraduate Research is a national professional organization that encourages the development of undergraduate research programs by generating awareness and national support. It consists of members and Councilors (elected representatives) representing 8 disciplinary divisions: At Large, Biology; Chemistry; Geology; Computer Science and Mathematics; Physics/Astronomy; Psychology; and Engineering. The CUR "April Dialogue" is one means by which CUR strives to promote the value of undergraduate research. In this forum, faculty members and administrators from primarily undergraduate institutions meet Washington, DC-based policy makers and federal program officers, to discuss and debate. CUR believes that it is increasingly important that the science community works to ensure that those in the U.S. Congress who provide funding for science and science education have a clear understanding of theprograms they fund and why these programs are important. Undergraduate research must be among those programs that members of Congress understand if it is to continue to be supported. Nothing more effectively demonstrates the value of undergraduate research than the words and stories of the student participants themselves. For this reason, in conjunction with "April Dialogue", CUR hosts an undergraduate poster session on Capitol Hill. At this event, members of Congress meet directly with student researchers at a poster session devoted to the students' research.

Selection for presentation at the Undergraduate Posters on the Hill session is, as you can imagine, highly competitive. Only a handful of students' work is chosen by a review team of faculty in the students' area of research. This year, almost 90 submissions were received from the Division of Psychology. From these, only a select few were chosen to represent the best of undergraduate research at primarily undergraduate institutions to the Congress and Senate in April. Wheaton's Psychobiology Research Team was one of the select! This is an EXCEPTIONAL honor for our students to have received; it was a competitive, peer-reviewed application process, and their work will now be showcased for national representatives as exemplary undergraduate research.

Much of this research was supported by Wheaton Fellowship and Foundation money, as well as by Gebbie Faculty/Student Partership Awards. The work the students propose to present reflects the past few years of work by the Team, including research that has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and presented at regional, national, and international conferences.

Visit this site again in a few weeks for pictures from our Washington trip!

Members of the Psychobiology Research Team Mentioned in the Winning Proposal:

Jill Brederson '99--coauthor, current teammember

Melissa Milton '98--coauthor, current teammember

Jonathan Thayer '97

Igor Schwartzman '98

Kendra Ward '00

Mary Wilber '00

Nick Lorch '00

Amber Davis '02--current teammember

Elizabeth Curtis '02--current teammember

Andrew Ferree '99

Kristine Smith '97

Emily Gates '97

New Members of the Team (as of Feb. '99; working on projects described in the proposal):

Jack Thatcher '01

Sue Adams '01

Bridget Sullivan-Stevens '02

THE SUCCESSFUL ABSTRACT:

The Prenatally Stressed Animal Model for Human Chronic Anxiety Disorders: A Team Approach

A proposal submitted by Jill Brederson '99 and Melissa Milton '98, on behalf of all of the members of the Wheaton College Psychobiology Research Team*

Program in Psychobiology, Wheaton College, Norton, MA 02766

Team Mentor and Advisor: Dr. Kathleen Morgan, Dept. of Psychology, Wheaton College

*(Teammembers {listed in alphabetical order} include: Jill Brederson '99, Elizabeth Curtis '02, Amber Davis '02, Lindsay Dudbridge '00, Jody Farber '99, Andy Ferree '99, Emily Gates '97, Heather Millette '97, Igor Schwartzman '98, Kristine Smith '97, Jonathan Thayer '97, Kendra Ward '00)

When humans say that they are afraid, they are typically describing a state of mental and physiological arousal in response to a real or perceived threat of some kind to their personal success or survival. Anxiety, in contrast, is the term we use to describe that same arousal and discomfort in the absence of any particular threat. Like fear, anxiety is a universal human experience, but one that typically dissipates over time. However for some people, anxiety is a chronic, enduring, and disabling state, interfering with their ability to lead normal lives, and often associated with despair, physiological dysfunction, and even attempted suicide.

Chronic anxiety is the most commonly diagnosed psychological disorder, affecting an estimated 43 million people nationwide (Winokur, 1994). Experimental evidence to date has suggested that a variety of neurotransmitter systems may be involved in the production and maintenance of pathological anxiety (Barchas, 1994; Reiman, Fusselman, Fox, & Raiche, 1989). However, the biological underpinnings of chronic anxiety are not well understood.

One animal model that may be of assistance in contributing to our understanding of the anxiety disorders is the prenatally stressed (PNS) animal. Like chronically anxious people, PNS animals show exaggerated emotional responses to routine as well as stressful events (Thompson, 1957; Hockman, 1961; Ader & Plaut, 1968; Fride, Dan, Feldon, Halevy, & Weinstock, 1986; Takahashi, Haglin, & Kalin, 1992; Clarke & Schneider, 1993; Poltyrev, Keshet, Kay, & Weinstock, 1996). They also show behavioral inhibition when placed in challenging situations (Clarke & Schneider, 1996). Exposure to PNS also decreases rates of social play in rodents (Takahashi, Haglin, & Kalin, 1992; Smith, 1997), and reduces exploratory behavior (Fride & Weinstock, 1989; Wakshlak & Weinstock, 1990; Poltyrev et al., 1996). These and other studies depict the behavior of PNS animals as quite similar to that of the chronically anxious person.

PNS animals also have many features in common with autistic and severely behaviorally inhibited children. Like these children, our PNS animals show excessive emotional reactivity to routine events, and an active avoidance of novelty. Our rats show behavioral stereotypies and abnormal behaviors (as do these children), perhaps as a method of coping with their excessive emotions (Morgan & Thayer, 1997). Autistic children show increased pain tolerances (Panksepp & Sahley, 1987; Gillberg et al, 1990) similar to those seen in our PNS rats (Thayer, 1997). And at least some researchers (e.g., Bauman, 1996) find brain damage in such children similar to the damage that we have found (Ward, Schwartzman, & Morgan, 1997; Schwartzman & Morgan, 1998) in our rats. For these reasons, we also consider our PNS animals to be a possible animal model for disorders of childhood such as autism and debilitating shyness.

The purpose of our research team's program of research is to explore the effects of exposure to prenatal stress on postnatal development and behavioral competency. We believe that the research we do makes an important contribution to our understanding of the long-term consequences and underlying psychobiology of chronic anxiety. Finally, we believe that the model of the research team as employed by our mentor, Dr. Kathleen Morgan, is ideal for encouraging future behavioral science researchers and promoting psychological science. Below, we describe the nature of the Psychobiology Research Team, and the Team's findings that we propose to bring to the April Dialogue.

The Psychobiology Research Team

Our mentor Dr. Kathy Morgan has formed an effective research team consisting of students from all class years. The team meets once a week to debrief and share results. Subteams of students work on a particular subset of the data collection and analysis, but every team member learns how to do all the tasks used by the team as a whole. Thus within the team, there are specialists, while everyone on the team is a bit of a generalist. Students that are more experienced in the use of a given technique train others--in some cases, first year students are teaching seniors how to use the microtome, while seniors teach juniors how to score videotape data. At the end of the semester, students present talks on their findings, and many have presented their work at international, national, and regional conferences. The format of the team builds a work and learning collaboration that is identical to those we believe we will find in the workplace, and gives us "on-the-job" training, while increasing our science literacy and technical skill sets. Each member of the team learns with the others, as well as from the others--and learns by doing. We believe that the kind of research partnership between students and faculty that is evident in the Psychobiology Research Team is an ideal way to learn and to do science. The Research Team experience is also an effective means of promoting student success in the sciences, as all of the Research Team members who have graduated to date are in graduate training or have jobs in their major fields1.

A Sampling of Psychobiology Research Team Findings:

To date, the Psychobiology Research Team has investigated the effects of exposure to prenatal stress on a number of physiological and behavioral parameters, and a summary of these data is what we propose to bring to the CUR "April Dialogue." Members of the Psychobiology Research team have shown that the brains of PNS infant rats weigh significantly less than do the brains of control rats (Thayer, unpublished data; Ward, Schwartzman, & Morgan, 1997; Schwartzman & Morgan, 1998). Evidence from previous studies suggests that an area of the hippocampus is damaged in chronically anxious individuals. The Psychobiology Research team hypothesized that if our PNS animals were indeed chronically anxious, and if such anxiety were accompanied by hippocampal damage, then we would expect to find deficits in spatial skills in the PNS animals. A current study supports this hypothesis, finding that PNS animals perform more poorly than do control animals in the Morris water maze (a common tool used to measure spatial ability in laboratory animals) (Morgan & Milton, in preparation).

In our lab, PNS infant rats have been shown to be more emotionally distressed when separated from their dams and littermates, (Morgan, 1996; Morgan, Thayer, & Frye, in press), and reflect that distress in extreme behavioral inhibition (not unlike some of Jerome Kagan's shy or behaviorally inhibited children) (Kagan, Reznick, & Gibbons, 1989). A study of opiate-mediated pain perception in these animals in 1996-97 further suggests that prenatal stress produces animals that are hyperemotional (Thayer, 1997), since chronic anxiety is known to produce changes in pain sensitivity. And several behavioral studies continue to show that PNS animals are overanxious compared to controls. For example, Smith (1997) showed that environmental enrichment increases social and exploratory behaviors in both control and PNS rats. However, the behaviors of PNS rats are less altered by environmental enrichment, as well as by isolation, and PNS rats tended to avoid social contact. PNS rats are also less sensitive to social facilitation of diet preference (Morgan, Schwartzman, & Ward, 1997), and more anxious in an elevated plus maze (Morgan & Brederson, in preparation).

The results of our work and the work of others suggests that the prenatally stressed animal is a good and effective model of the chronically anxious human. Anxiety is the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder. The work of the Psychobiology Research Team thus makes an important contribution to our understanding of a widespread and debilitating human condition.

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1Kristine Smith, now at Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine; Igor Schwartzman, Harvard School of Public Health; Jonathan Thayer, Organogenesis; Heather Millette, McLean Hospital; Emily Gates, Child Life Services, Univ. of Chicago Hospital