Holly (2012) paper
I am still a bit confused by the concept of cross-sensitization. By definition, it means the sensitization of one stimulus is generalized to a related stimulus but that it is non-associative. In this paper, I interpreted the cross-sensitization here as the sensitization of stress is generalized to the sensitization of cocaine so that stress causes the response to cocaine to be amplified and stronger (not entirely confident that’s what cross-sensitization means here). If this is what cross-sensitization refers to, I’m confused about how stress and cocaine response are related without any explicit association and why increased stress would increase the cocaine response. One thought I have is that the rewarding effects of cocaine help combat or mitigate the harmful effects of stress and so the brain adapts to stress and copes with it by amplifying any incoming rewarding stimulus. If this is the case, I wonder if other rewarding stimuli (e.g. food, sex) have similar effects when combined with stress. If being in estrous has similar neurological effects as being stressed, then it would also make sense why being in estrous also causes some longer lasting effects of cocaine.
For many of the results, I noticed that the male results were less deviated than the female results. In the 3 figures showing results for each of the 3 experiments, many of the error bars for females are larger than their male counterparts, especially those of stressed females. The male error bars are relatively small across all 3 figures. I wonder why results from male rats were more consistent with each other compared to those from female rats. Even if the wide range from females is due to small n’s, it wouldn’t explain why we don’t see this in males since the male groups had similarly low n’s.
In the introduction, I noticed that the paper uses “gender” when discussing human subjects and “sex” when discussing non-human subjects. I’m not at all familiar with human biology research. Are human subjects grouped according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex? That doesn’t make much sense since sex differences are dependent on biological sex and not gender.
Vassoler (2013)
I wonder if there would be sex differences between offspring of self-administering females the way there are sex differences between offspring of self-administering males. Females would not only contribute an egg the way males contribute sperm. Females would also gestate the offspring which would allow for more ways for the cocaine to have an impact on the offspring. However, if we could use the egg of a self-administering female and use a neutral female as a surrogate, we could investigate self-administering females’ offspring similarly to how researchers investigated self-administering males’ offspring.
I am still a bit confused by the concept of cross-sensitization. By definition, it means the sensitization of one stimulus is generalized to a related stimulus but that it is non-associative. In this paper, I interpreted the cross-sensitization here as the sensitization of stress is generalized to the sensitization of cocaine so that stress causes the response to cocaine to be amplified and stronger (not entirely confident that’s what cross-sensitization means here). If this is what cross-sensitization refers to, I’m confused about how stress and cocaine response are related without any explicit association and why increased stress would increase the cocaine response. One thought I have is that the rewarding effects of cocaine help combat or mitigate the harmful effects of stress and so the brain adapts to stress and copes with it by amplifying any incoming rewarding stimulus. If this is the case, I wonder if other rewarding stimuli (e.g. food, sex) have similar effects when combined with stress. If being in estrous has similar neurological effects as being stressed, then it would also make sense why being in estrous also causes some longer lasting effects of cocaine.
For many of the results, I noticed that the male results were less deviated than the female results. In the 3 figures showing results for each of the 3 experiments, many of the error bars for females are larger than their male counterparts, especially those of stressed females. The male error bars are relatively small across all 3 figures. I wonder why results from male rats were more consistent with each other compared to those from female rats. Even if the wide range from females is due to small n’s, it wouldn’t explain why we don’t see this in males since the male groups had similarly low n’s.
In the introduction, I noticed that the paper uses “gender” when discussing human subjects and “sex” when discussing non-human subjects. I’m not at all familiar with human biology research. Are human subjects grouped according to their gender identity rather than their biological sex? That doesn’t make much sense since sex differences are dependent on biological sex and not gender.
Vassoler (2013)
I wonder if there would be sex differences between offspring of self-administering females the way there are sex differences between offspring of self-administering males. Females would not only contribute an egg the way males contribute sperm. Females would also gestate the offspring which would allow for more ways for the cocaine to have an impact on the offspring. However, if we could use the egg of a self-administering female and use a neutral female as a surrogate, we could investigate self-administering females’ offspring similarly to how researchers investigated self-administering males’ offspring.
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