Syrian hamsters show complex social play behavior and provide a valuable animal model
for delineating the neurobiological mechanisms and functions of social play. In this review …

Across species, animals organize into social dominance hierarchies that serve to decrease
aggression and facilitate survival of the group. Neuroscientists have adopted several model …

Generalization is a fundamental cognitive ability of organisms to deal with the uncertainty in
real-world situations. Excessive fear generalization and impaired reward generalization are …

Stressful life events are ubiquitous and well-known to negatively impact mental health.
However, in both humans and animal models, there is large individual variability in how …

The medial amygdala (MeA) controls several types of social behavior via its projections to
other limbic regions. Cells in the posterior dorsal and posterior ventral medial amygdala …

Resilience, the ability to overcome stressful conditions, is found in most mammals and varies
significantly among individuals. A lack of resilience can lead to the development of …

Epidemiological studies have shown that environmental insults and maternal stress during
pregnancy increase the risk of several psychiatric disorders in the offspring. Converging …

Dominance relationships are identified by changes in agonistic behavior toward specific
individuals. While there are considerable individual and species differences in dominance …

Social stressors are known to have strong negative impacts on mental health. There is a
long history of preclinical social defeat stress studies in rodents focusing on males that has …

Social stressors negatively impact social function, and this is mediated by the amygdala
across species. Social defeat stress is an ethologically relevant social stressor in adult male …