Circadian patterns of basic emotional reactivity and stress related events revisited in mice treated with lithium: behavioral rhythmometric analyses.

This research dealt with rhythmometric methods for estimating and comparing the main temporal parameters characterizing the circadian structure of behavioral events in mice with and without lithium treatment. Such comparative chronobiologic studies would tend to demonstrate in psychophysiology that this drug does not displace the circadian patterns of basic emotionality, but does displace some behavioral circadian rhythms associated with more corticalized integrations. The present behavioral observations would tend to support the hypothesis that lithium salts modify the circadian structure of emotionality by cortical modulation rather than only by physiological subcortical integrations. Such circadian studies show also that behavioral chronobiology raises some working hypotheses in comparative ethology and permits the development of new heuristic concepts in the field of biological psychiatry.