Environmental enrichment prevents acute restraint stress-induced anxiety-related behavior but not changes in basolateral amygdala spine density.

Previous studies showed that acute restraint stress or transient elevation of glucocorticoid (GC) stress hormones produces emergent changes in both anxiety behavior and dendritic branches in the basolateral amygdala complex (BLA) of rats. In this work, we demonstrate that exposure to environmental enrichment (EE) prevented stress-induced increases in anxiety (emerging 10 days post-stress) in adult rats without blocking stress-induced dendritic branch remodeling in the BLA nor stress-induced enhancement of GC serum levels.