Abstract Depression and other stress-related psychiatric disorders are characterized by dysfunction in mood and motivation. Understanding the molecular mechanisms mediating dysfunction in these processes and the factors underlying stress-susceptibility vs. stress-resilience is the primary goal of the parent R01 grant in the lab of Eric Nestler. The parent R01 grant takes an unbiased large-scale bioinformatics approach to characterize the transcriptional regulators of stress action and their impact on affective processes. While the parent R01 grant uses standard behavioral neuroscience approaches to measure motivation and reward-related endpoints in rodents, these measures are often simple in nature and limited in their ability to approximate the complexity of affective processes observed in human patients struggling with stress-related disorders. Thus, the goal of this supplement proposal is to expand the animal paradigms employed by the parent R01 grant with a focus on enhancing the translational validity of the behavioral measures used for the study of depression. This will be accomplished by leveraging the skills of physician-scientist and psychiatry resident Brian Sweis, who has expertise in complex animal behavior and has recently developed a novel set of tasks translated for use across species that applies principals of neuroeconomics in order to capture evolutionarily conserved interactions between cognition and affect. This proposal aims to generate a rich behavioral data set to match that of the “big data” available in the parent R01 grant’s genome-wide sequencing studies. This supplement will enhance the novelty and utility of the parent project while remaining within the scope of the parent project and will provide novel skills in molecular neuroscience and bioinformatics to the trainee.