Dominance status predicts social fear transmission in laboratory rats

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• 作者：Carolyn E. Jones ; Marie-H. Monfils
• 关键词：Social learning ; Fear conditioning ; Dominance ; Play behavior
• 刊名：Animal Cognition
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：November 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：19
• 期：6
• 页码：1051-1069
• 全文大小：1,929 KB
• 刊物类别：Biomedical and Life Sciences
• 刊物主题：Life Sciences
  Behavioural Sciences
  Zoology
  Human Physiology
  
• 出版者：Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
• ISSN：1435-9456
• 卷排序：19

文摘

Acquiring information about stimuli that predict danger, through either direct experience or inference from a social context, is crucial for individuals’ ability to generate appropriate behaviors in response to threats. Utilizing a modified demonstrator–observer paradigm (fear conditioning by proxy) that allows for free interaction between subjects, we show that social dominance hierarchy, and the interactive social behaviors of caged rats, is predictive of social fear transmission, with subordinate rats displaying increased fear responses after interacting with a fear-conditioned dominant rat during fear retrieval. Fear conditioning by proxy conserves some of the pathways necessary for direct fear learning (e.g., lateral amygdala) but is unique in that it requires regions necessary for emotional regulation (e.g., anterior cingulate cortex), making this paradigm an important tool for evaluating learning and behavior in the laboratory setting.