Effects of chronic stress on startle response: a three dimensional analysis

Abstract

A startle measuring system was designed to isolate forces exerted by a rodent into three rectangular coordinates, digitize and store the resulting signals, and process the signals to perform correlation and spectral analysis on them. This effect is studied to find characteristic differences in behavior between normal and chronically stressed animals. This system is claimed to be an improvement on existing systems as it can segregate each component in quadrature and the mean vertical components can be removed from the readings as the weight of the animal to normalize the signals for comparisons across groups and time.<>