Grooming is among the most evolutionary ancient and highly represented behaviours in many animal species. It represents a significant proportion of an animal's total activity and between 30-50% of their waking hours. Recent research has demonstrated that grooming is regulated by specific brain circuits and is sensitive to stress, as well as to pharmacologic compounds and genetic manipulation, making it ideal for modelling affective disorders that arise as a function of stressful environments, such as stress and post-traumatic stress disorder. Over a series of 12 chapters that introduce and explicate the field of grooming research and its significance for the human and animal brain, this book covers the breadth of grooming animal models while simultaneously providing sufficient depth in introducing the concepts and translational approaches to grooming research. Written primarily for graduates and researchers within the neuroscientific community.

The serotonin transporter is a key brain protein that modulates the reuptake of the neurotransmitter serotonin from synaptic spaces back into the presynaptic neuron. This control over neuronal signalling makes it a prime area of neuroscientific study. In this book an international team of top experts introduce and explicate the role of serotonin and the serotonin transporter in both human and animal brains. They demonstrate the relevance of the transporter and indeed the serotonergic system to substrates of neuropsychiatric disorders, and explain how this knowledge is translated into valid animal models that will help foster new discoveries in human neurobiology. Writing for graduate students and academic researchers, they provide a comprehensive coverage of a wide spectrum of data from animal experimentation to clinical psychiatry, creating the only book exclusively dedicated to this exciting new avenue of brain research.

Stress is an adaptive response that has developed throughout evolution, and is associated with multiple changes in the biochemistry, histology and physiology of an organism. As stress may induce or contribute to multiple neuropsychiatric disorders, the rigorous investigation of the neural substrates of stress has become a critical endeavour of contemporary biomedical science. This book explores the physiological responses that researchers have attempted to assess in stress-evoked behavioural changes, using both human and animal "experimental" models in clinical and non-clinical research. Though all aspects of the field have their challenges, animal experimental research of stress is a particularly difficult but meaningful task. This book provides succinct and relevant summaries of progress in the area of assessing stress response and the conditions contributing to it.