A dyad shows mutual changes during social buffering of conditioned fear responses in male rats.

A dyad shows mutual changes during social buffering of conditioned fear responses in male rats.
Behav Brain Res. 2019 Mar 14;:
Authors: Kiyokawa Y, Yasong L, Takeuchi Y
Abstract
The presence of an affiliative conspecific reduces stress responses to a wide variety of stimuli. This phenomenon is termed "social buffering". We previously found that the presence of another naïve rat (associate) reduced conditioned fear responses to an auditory conditioned stimulus in a conditioned subject rat. Although we subsequently conducted a series of studies to examine behavioral, physiological, and neural changes during social buffering in the conditioned subject, the changes in the associate remained unclear. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated the behavioral and neural changes in the associate. Fear-conditioned and non-conditioned rats were re-exposed to the conditioned stimulus with an associate placed in the same enclosure (Experiment 1) or separated by a wire-mesh partition (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, the associate exhibited increased anogenital contact and allo-grooming, which were accompanied by increased c-Fos expression in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and central amygdala. These results suggest that the subject and associate mutually affected each other during social buffering. In contrast, in Experiment 2, we found only a difference in the time course of investigation between associates tested with th...

Source: Behavioural Brain Research - March 13, 2019 Category: Neurology Authors: Kiyokawa Y, Yasong L, Takeuchi Y Tags: Behav Brain Res Source Type: research