Anxiety models

Abstract

Anxiety has been defined as a state or apprehension of future fear characterized by a variety of physiological responses such as increases in arterial pressure, cardiac and respiratory frequency, and sweating. A variety of experimental animal models have been developed to study anxiety. These models should meet some criteria such as similarity between the symptoms observed clinically and those observed in the animals, and they must have predictive value. Some models are based on the spontaneous behavior of the animals (unconditioned responses) and some others on the conditioning of particular responses. The development of these models has allowed to detect the anxiolytic and anxiogenic effects of different compounds and to study the neural substrate of anxiety. At first it was not clear which type of anxiety each procedure was modeling. Recently, however, research in this area has been oriented toward identifying which type of anxiety is being measured in relation with each model.