Welcome to the website of the Blanchard Laboratory at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This is a behavioral neuroscience lab that has examined aggressive and defensive behaviors. We have analyzed several major components of mammalian defensive behavior, including flight, freezing, defensive threat/attack, and risk assessment, each of which represents a response to particular configurations of threat stimuli and characteristics of the situations in which these are encountered.

However, we also do research on the pharmacology of these behaviors. Because this work suggests that defensive behaviors may provide particularly sensitive and selective response to drugs that are effective against specific anxiety disorders, the lab is very interested in examining defense (and aggression) in a wide variety of mammalian species, and the site will occasionally display some of the more unusual animals with which we have worked.

More recently, with our current NIH support, we have been examining models of social behavior. The tests which we developed are used to examine genetic differences related to autism. We have also been using a variety of techniques to understand these genetics differences, including the study of knockout mice, immunohistochemistry, and cFOS expression.

Dr. Caroline Blanchard is the current president of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society and past president of the International Society for Research on Aggression. Dr. Robert Blanchard has also served in each of these capacities.

The web site has also been created in order to make some of our articles available as PDF files; and to provide materials for classes we teach. If you are interested in any aspect of this material, please feel free to get in touch: Our email code, Blanchar@hawaii.edu is (to the considerable irritation of the server here) for both of us, since it saves having to send messages back and forth between us.