Sex-specific Stress and Behavioural Responses to Human Experimenters in Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The sex of the experimenter may cause stress in animal models and be a major confounding factor in preclinical research. We studied the effects of the sex of the experimenter on female and male rat anxiety behaviours using thigmotaxis in the open field test, anxiety-induced changes in brain and back temperature using infra-red thermography, and alterations in plasma concentrations of stress hormones, corticosterone and oxytocin. Female rats displayed consistently exacerbated anxiety-related behaviours along with increased infrared cutaneous temperature during repeated exposure to male experimenters. Experimental stress further intensified thermal responses to a male experimenter, especially in female rats. These behavioural responses to a male experimenter in females were associated with higher circulating corticosterone and lower oxytocin levels. Similar responses were induced by a T-shirt worn by a human male. These findings suggest that emotional and physiological responses of female rats to a male experimenter are influenced by visual and olfactory cues. These results emphasize the need to standardize and report experimenter sex throughout a study to avoid ambiguity in interpretation of the results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".