Neonatal corticosterone administration in rodents as a tool to investigate the maternal programming of emotional and immune domains

Abstract Neonatal experiences exert persistent influences on individual development. These influences encompass numerous domains including emotion, cognition, reactivity to external stressors and immunity. The comprehensive nature of the neonatal programming of individual phenotype is reverberated in the large amount of experimental data collected by many authors in several scientific fields: biomedicine, evolutionary and molecular biology. These data support the view that variations in precocious environmental conditions may calibrate the individual phenotype at many different levels. Environmental influences have been traditionally