Oct 07, 2015 11:06 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

New research suggests that stress experienced during adolescence prepares people for future challenges.

After conducting an animal study, researchers from Penn State University found that rats exposed to frequent physical, social, and predatory stress during adolescence solved problems and foraged more efficiently under high-threat conditions in adulthood compared with rats that developed without stress.

"Even though the stressed rats were really run through the gamut, they do not come out with an overall cognitive deficit," researcher Lauren Chaby, student in neuroscience and ecology, said in a statement. "What they do have is this context-specific performance that's linked to the environment that they experienced during adolescence."

For the study, researchers exposed adolescent rats to a range of unpredictable stressors, including smaller or tilted cages, social isolation or crowding, and predator scents or vocalizations.  They then examined the rats when they were adults to see if there were lasting effects of stress in adolescence, by testing their ability to forage for food under both standard and high-threat conditions -- bright light, a taxidermy hawk swooping overhead, and hawk vocalizations.

Under high-threat conditions, adult rats stressed during adolescence started foraging sooner, visited 20 percent more food patches, and obtained 43 percent more food than a control group of unstressed adult rats. These statistically significant results suggest that growing up in a stressful environment can prepare rats for a stressful, high-predation environment in the future.

The findings are detailed in the journal Animal Behavior. 

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