High-alcohol-drinking rats exhibit persistent freezing responses to discrete cues following Pavlovian fear conditioning

We previously reported that high-alcohol-drinking (HAD) rats exhibited selective deficits in active avoidance learning and that those deficits were partially reversed by moderate doses of ethanol under certain training conditions Pharmacol. Biochem. Behav. 75 (2003) 89]. In that study, we hypothesized that HAD deficits resulted from exaggerated fear in the conditioning context and that the anxiolytic properties of ethanol, along with prior exposure to the conditioning apparatus, were responsible for the facilitated avoidance learning that was observed in HAD rats following moderate doses of ethanol. The current study was designed to test whether HAD rats exhibit behaviors consistent with increased fear in aversive learning contexts. We used a standard Pavlovian fear conditioning paradigm to assess behavioral freezing in HAD (HAD-1 and HAD-2) and low-alcohol-drinking (LAD; LAD-1 and LAD-2) rats. No significant differences were observed between HAD-1 and HAD-2 or between LAD-1 and LAD-2 rats, indicating that the replicate lines performed similarly in this study. Both HAD and LAD rats exhibited robust fear conditioning during training. Although no differences were observed between HAD and LAD rats during fear training, HAD rats failed to extinguish freezing behavior in response to the discrete tone conditional stimulus during subsequent fear retention tests. Thus, HAD rats demonstrated prolonged cue-elicited fear that was resistant to extinction.