Abstract
Male Wistar rats were trained to avoid footshock in an automated two-way shuttle box. Having reached the criterion of 10 correct consecutive avoidance responses half the animals were given response-prevention trials and the remainder were returned to the home cage. Lysine vasopressin (LVP; 1 μg/rat) or saline was injected (sc) at various intervals after avoidance training or prevention trials. Twenty-four hours later the animals were returned to the apparatus for extinction testing. It was found that LVP increased responding when injected after prevention trials but decreased responding in rats confined in the home cage. The results confirm that post-training vasopressin injections may reduce subsequent extinction responding compared to saline controls and show that the direction of the peptide's effects can be altered by manipulating pretreatment behavioral parameters.
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