Studying Negative Affect Using a Head-Fixed Rodent Behavior Training System and Mightex Behavior Camera
Opioid withdrawal can produce negative emotional states that contribute to drug relapse. To better understand these changes, researchers can study how withdrawal affects the neural circuits involved in responses to natural rewards and threats. Facial expressions and reflexive behaviours in mice—such as grimacing, eye closure, pupil dilation, and licking—can provide valuable indicators of an animal’s underlying affective state.This application note explores how researchers can combine head-fixed behavioural training with high-speed video recording to study negative affect
Read the full application note below to see how Chang Xu and colleagues used Mightex’s SBE-B015-U CMOS Camera, MLH-10X Zoom Lens, and PolyScan Software , to record mouse facial expressions during a Pavlovian conditioning task. The synchronized setup allowed the researchers to identify key behavioural events and examine responses to reward-predictive and air-puff-predictive cues.
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Meet the Researcher
Chang Xu (Suzy) is a researcher in the Department of Anesthesiology at Washington University in St. Louis, working in the Creed Lab, which studies the neural circuits underlying negative affect in opioid withdrawal — a key driver of drug relapse. Her research uses orofacial expressions in head-fixed mice to understand how drug use alters affective behaviors, capturing grimacing, eye closure, pupil dilation, and appetitive licking alongside decision variables during Pavlovian conditioning tasks.
She used the Mightex CMOS Behavior Camera (SBE-B015-U) with PolyScan software, synchronized with Bonsai to reliably time-lock behavioral video frames with neural and event timestamps.
““Working with the Mightex team has been a great experience—the camera shipped quickly, and technical support is highly responsive. We used the camera for pupil tracking during behavioural experiments. The camera has outstanding imaging quality and runs reliably with PolyScan software. It was also easy to integrate the system with open-source tools such as Bonsai, allowing us to flexibly update our experimental workflows”
— Chang Xu (Suzy), Creed Lab, Washington University in St. Louis
See how the CMOS Behavior Camera system captures orofacial expressions and behavioral responses in awake, head-fixed mice under infrared illumination during Pavlovian conditioning tasks.
Discover how the PolyScan Software reliably acquires high-frame-rate behavior video synchronized with Bonsai event timestamps to time-lock behavioral frames with neural signals.