ePoster

Social Exclusion Modifies the Behavioral Response and the Insular Representation of Physical Pain

Caroline Jia, Andrea Tran, Christopher Lee, Faith Aloboudi, Ella Say, Nick Thao, Kanha Batra, Aneesh Bal, Amanda Nguyen, Jeremy Delahanty, May Chan, Reesha Patel, Romy Wichmann, Laurel Keyes, Felix Taschbach, Yulong Li, Marcus Benna, Talmo Pereira, Hao Li, Kay Tye
COSYNE 2025(2025)
Montreal, Canada

Conference

COSYNE 2025

Montreal, Canada

Resources

Authors & Affiliations

Caroline Jia, Andrea Tran, Christopher Lee, Faith Aloboudi, Ella Say, Nick Thao, Kanha Batra, Aneesh Bal, Amanda Nguyen, Jeremy Delahanty, May Chan, Reesha Patel, Romy Wichmann, Laurel Keyes, Felix Taschbach, Yulong Li, Marcus Benna, Talmo Pereira, Hao Li, Kay Tye

Abstract

Social pain, the emotional pain caused by aversive experiences with one’s social group, can have deleterious effects on both mental and physical health1–3. Multiple theories have proposed that the experience of social pain can modulate physical pain5,6, but a neural mechanism has never been discovered. To address this gap, we have designed a novel paradigm, termed the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) Task, to systematically investigate the effects of Social Exclusion. During Social Exclusion (SE), mice have all been trained to associate a cue with reward delivery, and the subject is then separated from their cagemates and observes them collectively engaging in reward consumption, from which they are excluded. To control for the tones and reward delivery and visualizing other mice consuming rewards, we have the Tone Only (TO) control and One Mouse (OM) controls, in which there are no mice or one mouse respectively on the reward collection side of the chamber. Through a custom designed workflow using SLEAP, Keypoint-Moseq, and a Hidden Markov Model, we identified four behavioral states during this paradigm. We have found that the duration and dwell time spent in State 4, the “Attending” state in which mice are more likely to orient towards the social group, is increased during Social Exclusion (*p = 0.048, *p = 0.046) compared to controls. After experiencing Social Exclusion, mice have increased physical pain behavior (*p = 0.03). Using microendoscopic imaging and a generalized linear classifier, we discovered that after Social Exclusion, there is decreased discriminability between both non-nociceptive and nociceptive stimuli (**p = 0.002) as well as positive and negative valence (***p < 0.0001) within the anterior insular cortex (aIC). Together, these findings suggests that Social Exclusion modulates the physical pain experience through the affective, emotional component of pain through a generalized internal state that is biased towards aversion.

Unique ID: cosyne-25/social-exclusion-modifies-behavioral-0bc54a09