INTRODUCTION

The use of animal models figures prominently in mental health research and can play an especially important role in our efforts to understand developmental psychopathologies. The vast majority of animal research is conducted with rodents, and a typical approach involves experimentally re-creating behavioral, psychological, or neurobiological conditions that share some similarities with human psychopathologies or their biological substrates. For example, human depression can be experimentally modeled as learned helplessness in rodents, and tested in a forced swimming paradigm. In this task, a rat is placed in a water tank for a given period of time. After the rat's efforts at escaping from the tank through swimming have failed, some animals stop struggling, exhibiting behavioral passivity and neuroendocrine changes that share some similarities with those observed in people who suffer from clinical depression.

A different approach to modeling human psychopathologies involves identifying similar pathologies that occur naturally in animals. This approach is particularly powerful if conditions similar to human mental disorders are identified in animals that are closest and most similar to us, such as the anthropomorphic primates (i.e., the Old World monkeys and apes). In this chapter, we illustrate this approach by reviewing research on the natural occurrence of infant abuse in nonhuman primate populations, and by discussing how this research can help us understand the causes and developmental consequences of child maltreatment in humans (see also Maestripieri, 1999; Maestripieri & Carroll, 1998a; Sanchez, 2006).