Maternal and infantile influences upon exploratory behavior and emotional reactivity in the albino rat

A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial experiment was conducted to investigate the combined effects of maternal infantile handling, maternal pregnancy (offspring pre-natal) stress, and offspring infantile handling on adult open-field behavior and weight of albino rats. The primary results are as follows: (1) both offspring infantile handling and maternal pregnancy stress tend to increase adult exploratory behavior; (2) adult weight was lower for subjects whose mother had undergone stress during pregnancy than for offspring of non-stress females; (3) several 2-way interactions were found to significantly influence open-field exploration; (4) when offspring infantile handling was combined with maternal pregnancy stress, emotional reactivity (i.e., defecation) was found to increase significantly over that following either type of stimulation alone.