Chocoholic mice fear no pain

Have a craving for chocolate? BMC Neuorscience has shown that chocolate-craving mice will tolerate electric shock to get their fix. Rossella Ventura worked with a team of researchers to study the links between stress and compulsive food-seeking. She said, "We used a new model of compulsive behavior to test whether a previous stressful experience of hunger might override a conditioned response to avoid a certain kind of food-– in this case, chocolate".

Ventura first trained well-fed mice and starved mice to seek chocolate in one chamber rather than going into an empty chamber. Then, added a mild electric shock to the chamber containing the chocolate. Unsurprisingly, the well-fed animals avoided the sweet treat. However, mice that had previously been starved, resisted this conditioning – continuing to seek out chocolate despite the painful consequences. This is an index of compulsive behavior and the researchers claim that this matches compulsive food seeking in the face of negative consequences in humans.

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2010/02/09/chocoholic_mice_fear_no_pain.html