Abstract: Anxiety and depression disorders are severe mental diseases threatening humans’ health. Anxiety and depression animal models are applied to emulate humans’ anxiety and depression disorders on animals administrated psychosocial stress, So that their mechanism at cellular, molecular and genetic levels can be found out. Animal models are usually remarked by face validity, construct validity and predictive validity. Although there are some weakness in animal models now used , they have contributed much to the clinic and basic researches.

Key words: psychosocial stress, anxiety, depression, animal model.