A naturalistic method to test depression: Anticipation of play

The Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rat was developed as a control for the spontaneous hypertensive rat but has subsequently also been used as a genetic animal model of depression due to its hyper-responsiveness to stress. We used anticipation of social reward (i.e., a play partner) to assess behavioural and vocal differences between the WKY and normal Wistar (WI) rats in the juvenile period. We found marked differences between groups; the WKY rats, were less active, vocalized less, and used significantly fewer types of 50-kHz calls in comparison to their WI counterparts. The animals were re-tested in adulthood and the same differences existed in overall activity, types of vocalizations and the behavioural vocal profiles used by the two groups of animals. These findings provide a robust baseline for an animal model of depression using a social paradigm. This paradigm may be useful to evaluate the efficacy of pharmaceutical interventions as potential treatments of depression in WKY rats.