社交打扮
亲社会行为
心理学
社会便利化
社会心理学
群体凝聚力
扁桃形结构
神经科学
作者
Ye Emily Wu,James Dang,Lyle Kingsbury,Mingmin Zhang,Fangmiao Sun,Rongfeng K. Hu,Weizhe Hong
出处
期刊:Nature
[Springer Nature]
日期:2021-10-13
卷期号:599 (7884): 262-267
被引量:76
标识
DOI:10.1038/s41586-021-03962-w
摘要
The ability to help and care for others fosters social cohesiveness and is vital to the physical and emotional well-being of social species, including humans1–3. Affiliative social touch, such as allogrooming (grooming behaviour directed towards another individual), is a major type of prosocial behaviour that provides comfort to others1–6. Affiliative touch serves to establish and strengthen social bonds between animals and can help to console distressed conspecifics. However, the neural circuits that promote prosocial affiliative touch have remained unclear. Here we show that mice exhibit affiliative allogrooming behaviour towards distressed partners, providing a consoling effect. The increase in allogrooming occurs in response to different types of stressors and can be elicited by olfactory cues from distressed individuals. Using microendoscopic calcium imaging, we find that neural activity in the medial amygdala (MeA) responds differentially to naive and distressed conspecifics and encodes allogrooming behaviour. Through intersectional functional manipulations, we establish a direct causal role of the MeA in controlling affiliative allogrooming and identify a select, tachykinin-expressing subpopulation of MeA GABAergic (γ-aminobutyric-acid-expressing) neurons that promote this behaviour through their projections to the medial preoptic area. Together, our study demonstrates that mice display prosocial comforting behaviour and reveals a neural circuit mechanism that underlies the encoding and control of affiliative touch during prosocial interactions. Neurons in the medial amygdala regulate prosocial comforting behaviour towards distressed social partners in mice.
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