Defensive aggression toward an experimenter: no differences between males and females following septal, medial accumbens, or medial hypothalamic lesions in rats.

Septal, medial accumbens, medial hypothalamic, or sham lesions were each made in female and male hooded rats. Behavioral testing of defensiveness toward the experimenter was done blind at 6, 9, and 12 days postoperatively by a person who was unaware of the purpose of the experiment. There were no quantitative differences in the defensiveness displayed by male and female rats: both sexes displayed the increase in defensiveness characteristic of each lesion. It is argued that the neural systems modulating defensiveness may be similar in male and female rats and that this is related to evidence from human experiments indicating that comparable levels of defensive aggression are emitted by males and females under controlled experimental conditions.