Conditioned Place Preference - Advantages and Disadvantages - Disadvantages

Disadvantages

The conditioned place preference and aversion protocol is subject to several disadvantages and limitations. Perhaps the most significant disadvantage is that despite experimenters' best attempts to habituate animals to the procedure before conditioning, novelty seeking effects can skew the data.

Another limitation of the procedure is the distinction between a biased and an unbiased CPP-apparatus. Some authors indicate the importance to declare in the publication, which type of CPP-box has been used. Thus a pretest is needed to define a possibly existing preference to one compartment. In a biased context, it is to show an absolute CPP to the initially non-preferred place. Otherwise, for instance when anxiolytic drugs are used as the rewarding agent, we can interpret an only relative place preference to be derived from the anxiolytic effect of the drug. On the other hand, with a biased design, you can distinguish between the anxiolytic and antiaversive e€ffects of drugs independently from potential genuine rewarding e€ffects.
In addition, individuals who will be handling animals must be trained to do this consistently so as to minimize stress to the animal. It has been shown that stressful handling in rodents can weaken conditioning.

There is debate over whether or not the results obtained from drug studies can be generalized to drug reward in humans. It has been claimed that since the animal passively receives the drug, it cannot be compared.