Topic: aggression

Aggression is an innate behavior across animal species. It is essential for competing for food, defending territory, securing mates, and protecting families and oneself. Since initiating an attack requires no explicit learning, the neural circuit underlying aggression is believed to be genetically and developmentally hardwired. Despite being innate, aggression is highly plastic. It is influenced by a wide variety of experiences, particularly winning and losing previous encounters. Numerous studies have shown that winning leads to an increased tendency to fight while losing leads to flight in f

How the brain represents the body is a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience. Experimental studies are difficult because ‘the body is always there’ (William James). In recent years immersive virtual reality techniques have been introduced that deliver apparent changes to the body extending earlier techniques such as the rubber hand illusion, or substituting the whole body by a virtual one visually collocated with the real body, and seen from a normal first person perspective. This talk will introduce these techniques, and concentrate on how changing the body can change the mind and be

Aggression is an ethologically complex behavior with equally complex underlying mechanisms. Here, I present data on one form of aggression, appetitive or rewarding aggression, and the behavioral, cellular and system-level mechanisms guiding this behavior. First, I will present one way in which appetitive aggression is modeled in mice, and extend aggression motivation to the concept of compulsive aggression seeking and relapse. I will then briefly highlight recent advances in computer vision and machine learning for automated scoring of aggressive behavior, the role of specific cell-types in

For many animals, the sense of olfaction plays a major role in controlling sexual behaviors. Olfaction helps animals to detect mates, discriminate their status, and ultimately, decide on their behavioral output such as courtship behavior or aggression. Specific pheromone cues and receptors have provided a useful model to study how sensory inputs are converted into certain behavioral outputs. With the aid of recent advances in tools to record and manipulate genetically defined neurons, our understanding of the neural basis of sexual and social behavior has expanded substantially. I will discuss

The main pillars of social behaviors involve (1) mating, where males copulate with female partners to reproduce, and (2) aggression, where males fight conspecific male competitors in territory guarding. Decades of study have identified two key regions in the hypothalamus, the medial preoptic nucleus (MPN) and the ventrolateral part of ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) , that are essential for male sexual and aggressive behaviors, respectively. However, it remains ambiguous what area directs excitatory control of the hypothalamic activity and generates the initiation signal for social behaviors

Das Gehirn als Zentrale der sozialen Beziehungen und wenn es nicht mehr normal funktioniert: Darüber erfahren wir mehr am Donnerstag, 18. März. Dabei steht die Gesundheitsförderung im Fokus, ebenso, wie unser Gehirn bei Aggression tickt und was daraus für die Prävention und Behandlung folgt.

Aggression is an innate social behavior essential for competing for resources, securing mates, defending territory and protecting the safety of oneself and family. In the last decade, significant progress has been made towards an understanding of the neural circuit underlying aggression using a set of modern neuroscience tools. Here, I will talk about the history and recent progress in the study of aggression.