Effects of Prenatal Maternal Handling and Differential Housing on Offspring Emotionality, Plasma Corticosterone Levels, and Susceptibility to Gastric Erosions

Offspring of rats that were either unmanipulated or handled throughout preg-nancy were fostered to unmanipulated females at birth and group-housed at weaning. Behavioral responses to a reaction-to-handling test indicated that pre-natally stimulated animals were somewhat less emotional than controls. Also, there was an attenuated plasma corticosterone response to this test in the pre-natally handled females. Among females, prenatally manipulated animals were more susceptible to immobilization-produced gastric erosions. In a second ex-periment, prenatally handled and control rats, reared by unmanipulated females, were housed by groups or individually at weaning. The basic findings of Experi-ment 1 were confirmed and an interaction between prenatal treatment and hous-ing was observed, the difference between prenatally handled and control animals being most pronounced among the individually housed populations. V ^ F THE FACTORS which constitute the potential effects of stimulation which past history of an organism and thereby occurs in utero as a result of environ-exert an influence on the organism's mental stimulation of the mother. Be-adaptation to its environment, relatively ginning with an experiment by Thomp-little attention has been directed to the son,2r> a number of studies6 ' " • '*•23>-7 From the Department of Psychiatry, I'ni- h a v e confirmed the observation that the versity of Rochester School of Medicine and experimental induction of "anxiety " in Dentistry, and the Department of Psychology, a p r e g n a n t rat influences behavior of "SS^^STiSSST^Ii-MH. the of f s p r i n g. The majority of these «318 from the National Institute of Mental studies indicate that the offspring o