A preliminary study of manducatory behaviour influenced by stress and dental occlusion

Summary Stress and dental occlusion often are incriminated as causes of dysfunction of the manducatory system. How and in what degree these two factors came through has not yet been clearly worked out. Our study is carried out on a group of rats presenting one or both of these two factors and we proposed to examine the duration and frequency of some components of their behaviour – intake of solid food and grooming, to detect some possible perturbations on manducatory behaviour caused by stress and/or occlusal interference. Our study shows that stress induced by emotion or occlusal interference will change the microstructure of behaviour rather than the global component in itself. This implies that we must find a clear definition of the different types of microstructure to find out which ones are changed by the two incriminating factors and which part of the behaviour component will remain stable.