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Social anxiety and drugs: A lesson about addiction from monkeys.
January 6th, 2010
If you ever doubted the idea that monkeys are über similar to humans, read this:
A number of researchers at Wake Forest University school of 
Medicine looked at the social organization in 4 groups of monkeys. They then took either a dominant or subordinate monkey and put it in a cage next to a group of unfamiliar monkeys. The monkeys couldn’t hurt each other, but they could yell and scream, which they did, creating an emotionally stressful situation for the lone monkey.
After this stressful event, the researchers gave the monkey a chance to relax, human style: They were brought back to their normal housing and allowed to pull either on a lever that gave them food, or a lever that gave them a dose of cocaine. Want to guess what happened?
The subordinate monkeys were giving themselves a lot more cocaine than they had been before the stressful event, while the dominant monkeys were giving themselves less.
Brain scans during the event itself showed that the dominant monkeys showed increased activation in the brain’s pleasure regions but the subordinate monkeys showed less activation in stress and anxiety management areas. Sounds like a typical high-school bullying scene, the dominant monkeys were actually enjoying the fight! It was the socially inferior monkeys that were becoming stressed out.
What this teaches about addiction
The study supports the idea that stress can increase the tendency to do drugs, especially in those that are less able to protect against it.
The researchers caution that in humans, there are many more stressors than social rank. That’s definitely true, but try telling that to a high-school student…
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| Posted in: Drugs, Education Tags: addiction, Animal research, cocaine, high-school, rank, social, stress |
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3 Responses to “Social anxiety and drugs: A lesson about addiction from monkeys.”Leave a Reply | |
haha, I liked your article very much.
Thanks a bunch. I would have never thought that
humans are so similar with monkeys:p
[...] and strange the second time around and you will have already experienced some of the associated anxiety. If you’re going to be alone, make distinct plans for your activities and do the best you can [...]
Your post is very trivial because of the studies made upon the monkeys to show that stress triggers them to use more cocaine. Just like human beings, we are starting to be a drug addict, for example, a crystal meth addict just because we worries a lot about our surrounding,