Does Summer Always Get You Down? You Might Be A Rat
Rats get SAD in the summer Peter Boylan via Wikimedia Commons For nocturnal rodents, long days prompt long faces. During the short, dark winter days, many humans suffer from seasonal affective disorder, in which they experience symptoms of depression that subside come springtime (and recent research suggests all mental illnesses, not just depression, might get worse in winter.) A new study has found that rats get SAD, too-but during the long, sunny summer days, instead. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, exposed one group of rats to five hours of light and 19 hours of darkness every day for a week. A second group of rats spent one week with the opposite-19 hours of light and 5 hours of darkness each day. The biologists found that rats who spent most of the week in the dark had more neurons synthesizing dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward and...