Topic: resident-intruder task

Understanding how social behavior evolves across social isolation is both an enormous priority and technical challenge as exploring the neural underpinnings of self-initiated behaviors in a quantitative and rigorous manner is difficult without experimenter-defined trial structures. Although loneliness has been declared an epidemic, there are no therapeutic targets and no mechanistic explanations for how social isolation negatively impacts our health. The dynamic time course of social isolation has been conceptualized in a model of social homeostasis (Lee et al., 2021). Multiple timescales for

CCN2 is a matricellular protein that plays important roles in connective tissue. CCN2 is also expressed in the nervous system; however, its role is still unclear. To explore CCN2 function in the brain, we generated forebrain-specific Ccn2 knockout (FbCcn2 KO) mice. In this study, we examined the behavioral phenotypes of FbCcn2KO mice. Male mice lacking CCN2 in the forebrain exhibited normal locomotion, sensorimotor gating, and social behaviors but signs of anxiety and elevated reactive aggression. We checked the c-fos expression in aggression-related brain regions following the resident-intrud