In recent years. the concept of frustration has been central in both mental hygiene and social psychology. This is rightfully so. Frustration has been defined as any kind of thwarting or blocking of the motive (4. 7. 14). Any person involved in modern day living is confronted with many types of situations which do actually block or thwart his wishes or drives. A person may be blocked because of conditions existing in the environment. because of personal inadequacies. and because of conflicting drives. Since a person is forced to face so many sources of frustration. the method that he chooses to use in an attempt to adjust has become paramount in importance.

The study of frustration has been of interest to various people including psychiatrists, psychologists, and educators for a number of years. These people have been interested in frustration because the complexity of our modern life has involved so many frustrating experiences. Frustration has been defined by Dollard (8, p. 7) as "an interference with the occurrence of an instigated goal response at its proper time." Ruch (21, p. 151) defined frustration as "the denial or thwarting by some obstacle which lies between a need and its goal . " These two definitions are in essence identical. The average person has many obstacles which block or thwart his goals daily. Some of these may be insignificant such as missing a bus, while others may be of utmost importance such as losing a job. Missing a bus may be annoying but it may be corrected by catching a later bus. Losing a job may be a very threatening experience which might affect a person's whole attitude toward life.

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Early life adversity (ELA) is a prevalent experience in young populations worldwide and can come in many forms, including limited access to resources as in many low socio-economic status households. ELA in humans has been linked to a variety of negative psychiatric outcomes including increased risk for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, major depressive disorder (MDD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorder (SUD). One characteristic that these disorders share is a disruption in motivational processes. Motivation is largely regulated by the mesocorticolimbic dopamine (DA) system but is also modulated by other brain regions including the medial preoptic area (mPOA) and is crucial for processing of natural rewards such as sexual reproduction. This circuitry is sensitive to estrogenic and androgenic signaling in both males and females. Interestingly, estrogens and androgens can be modulated by the experience of ELA, pointing to gonadal hormones as a potential mediator for the impact of ELA on motivation and risk for psychiatric disorders. In the first set of experiments presented here, we characterize the limited bedding and nesting model (LBN) of early life adversity in rodents, in which rat dams and their pups are housed in a limited resource environment from postnatal day (PND) 2 through 9. LBN dams exhibited less self-care behaviors and more pup-directed behaviors, including grooming and nursing, compared to control dams. This type of maternal care is not characteristic of healthy rat dam behavior and may represent a compensatory mechanism to combat the lack of resources. However, LBN-raised pups still exhibit developmental alterations, notably a decrease in body weight that persisted into adulthood and an increase in adult plasma estradiol levels specifically in males. We build on these findings in the second set of experiments, which explores whether changes in development and gonadal hormones may also impact male reproductive behavior. We found that LBN males have a shorter latency to engage in sex behaviors at earlier timepoints in the sex assay compared to controls, suggesting an enhancement in the acquisition of this repertoire of behaviors. This enhancement in behavior was accompanied by highly sex-specific changes in gene transcription in the mPOA which underlies reproductive behaviors. The identification of genes and signaling pathways that are altered by LBN in the male mPOA lays the groundwork for future studies investigating the mechanisms by which ELA alters reproductive behaviors and underlying motivational processes. / Psychology

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