Play and Adversity - How the Playful Mammalian Brain Withstands Threats and Anxieties - Stephen M. Siviy

Oct 15, 2026

Play and Adversity explores how mammals—especially juvenile rats—use play as a coping process in threatening environments. Drawing on experiments that introduce fear during play, it describes fearful behaviors, quantifies changes in play activity, and examines how enhanced maternal care and benzodiazepines modify those effects. The discussion links these findings to the neurobiology of anxiety disorders, with attention to implications for children. The introduction frames economic and social adversity as a context for adult and child anxiety while emphasizing evolved coping mechanisms.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages18

Reading Time45 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Play in Rats

Play and Adversity How the Playful Mammalian Brain Withstands Threats and Anxieties • Stephen M. Siviy Most mammals play, but they do so in a dangerous world. The dynamic relationship between the stresses created by their world and the activity of play helps to explain the evolution of play in mammals, as the author demonstrates in evidence garnered from experiments that introduce elements of fear to rats at play. The author describes the resulting fearful behavior and quantifies the fluctuation in play that results, and then he investigates how these are modified by increased maternal care or the use of benzodiazepines. In conclusion, he discusses how such research can help shed light on the neurobiology underlying human anxiety disorders, especially in children. Introduction As I write this, most if not all, industrialized nations are slowly emerging out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. With chronic economic uncertainty comes considerable anxiety among adults who are unemployed, underemployed, or fear they might lose their jobs. Children feel the impact of adult fears. In a world plagued by crime, terrorism, and natural disasters, anxiety can easily trickle down. We might think it is amazing that children play at all, but getting from birth to adulthood has never been easy for humans—or any other species, for that matter. Yet various species have survived through countless episodes of adversity, and they did so partly because they developed arsenals of coping mechanisms. We presume that play as a phenotype has been through the rigors of natural selection and has afforded some advantage—or at the very least, has not been a significant disadvantage—to species that play. © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Play is widespread among mammals. Well over 90 percent of all mammals engage in some type of playful behavior prior to sexual maturity (Fagen 1981) . Although often specialists investigate play as a behavior typical of mammals (MacLean 1990), researchers have also observed it in several bird species as well as in some reptiles (Burghardt 2005; Fagen 1981) and even in an invertebrate (Mather and Anderson 1999). Indeed, play may have emerged as a stable behavior pattern across a variety of species over the course of evolution, but one that truly took hold in the mammalian brain. There, play seems to be largely asubcortical event. Studies show that almost complete removal of the neocortex in rats (Panksepp, Normansell, Cox, and Siviy 1994; Pellis, Pellis, and Whishaw 1992) or hamsters (Murphy, MacLean, and Hamilton 1981) leaves both with the urge to play and most of the components of play intact, which points to a brain system that probably appeared fairly early in the course of mammalian evolution. As prevalent as play proves tobe, it does not occur in a vacuum. For the young of many species, the journey from birth to adulthood can be filled with peril and considerable danger. Because play evolved amid these dangers, we need to understand its interaction with them in order to understand the evolution of mammalian playfulness. Play in Rats Most ofwhat I present in this article involves play in juvenile rats. There are many practical reasons for using rats as an experimental model in order to better understand the neurobiology of playfulness. With the exception of mice, which tend not to play very well, we know more about the behavior and neurobiology of the common lab rat than anyother species available for research. So it seems natural to study the playful behaviors of rats in order to understand the neurobiological substrates of mammalian playfulness. But this was not always so obvious. When I first walked into Jaak Panksepp’s lab at Bowling Green State University in the summer of 1981, I had every intention of studying some typeof social and emotional behavior in rats. But I never really thought of play as something that would be studied empi

FAQs

What question does the article address about play in mammals?

It examines how stresses and anxieties in the environment interact with play, helping explain why play evolved and persists in mammals.

How do experiments test the effect of fear on rat play?

Experiments introduce elements of fear into play settings for rats, then the resulting fearful behavior and fluctuations in play intensity are measured.

What factors modify fearful behavior during play in rats?

Increased maternal care and the use of benzodiazepines are investigated as influences that change the observed play and fear-related outcomes.

Oct 15, 2026

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