RCA0153 – Behavioral Neuroscience: Analyzing Anxiety and Depression

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This online course in behavioral neuroscience focuses on research related to mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. Enrollment in this course gives you access to content that will help you:

• Learn how to critically evaluate the use of different behavioral tests for anxiety and depression in laboratory mice.
• Evaluate how different behavioral tests can affect the interpretation of results.
• Collect behavioral data from mouse videos from compulsive-like, non-compulsive-like, and randomly bred mouse strains; a mouse model of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
• Develop an ability to analyze behavioral data.
• Develop an ability to interpret and discuss results in the context of human psychiatric disorders and the mouse model of OCD.
• Obtain a competency in describing key characteristics of anxiety and depression in humans and in animal models.
• Develop an ability to compare and contrast compulsive-like, anxiety-like, and depression-like behaviors in mice to equivalent conditions in humans.
• Develop a capability to formulate original research hypotheses.
• Obtain a competency in describing and discussing how basic research, as performed in this certificate program, contributes to the animal model of OCD and how it may have the potential to contribute to a better understanding of mental health and improving healthcare and the human condition.
• Learners who join this course should be free of objections to using mice in research.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Compare and contrast human and mouse behaviors.
• Collect, analyze, and interpret behavioral data from mouse videos.
• Establish a foundation in using behavioral tests in laboratory mice.
• Understand anxiety and depression in humans and in animals.
• Understand the role of animal models in studying human psychiatry.

Syllabus

• Module 1: Introduction, Anxiety: Background – open field test
• Module 2: Anxiety: Data Collection and Analysis
• Module 3: Depression: Background – tail suspension test
• Module 4: Depression: Data Collection and Analysis
• Module 5: Interpretation of results