Ooh I love talking about this project, it was so awesome.
We saw that social defeat (aka. bullying) had a long lasting negative effect on social behavior. Rats (who are usually pretty happy to meet other rats) would stay away from even their littermates (siblings).
I thought it was pretty impressive that something so small (there were about 5 ‘bullying’ sessions, in which there was hardly any physical fighting) could have such a big and long lasting effect.
We were also looking for changes in the brain, and had a hard time finding any. I think that was mostly because the changes would have been subtle and our method wasn’t very refined. We did see a change in the dopamine metabolism, which is curious.
Ooh I love talking about this project, it was so awesome.
We saw that social defeat (aka. bullying) had a long lasting negative effect on social behavior. Rats (who are usually pretty happy to meet other rats) would stay away from even their littermates (siblings).
I thought it was pretty impressive that something so small (there were about 5 ‘bullying’ sessions, in which there was hardly any physical fighting) could have such a big and long lasting effect.
We were also looking for changes in the brain, and had a hard time finding any. I think that was mostly because the changes would have been subtle and our method wasn’t very refined. We did see a change in the dopamine metabolism, which is curious.
Here’s a link to the paper: https://cbn.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/2007/PhysiolBehavVidal/2007PhysiolBehavVidal.pdf
Thanks for the question.
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