42.3 ANIMAL MODELS OF SOCIAL ATTACHMENT DEFICITS IN ASD

Abstract

Social attachments play a central role in most, if not all, levels of human interaction from parent-child attachment, friendship, and social affiliation to enduring partnerships with mates. Social attachment behaviors are clinically relevant, because devastating conditions, such as ASDs and schizophrenia, often manifest with a dramatic collapse of interpersonal interactions. It has been difficult to study social attachment, because none of the traditional genetic laboratory models exhibit adult social attachment behaviors. Prairie voles, in contrast, display social attachment as adults, such that mating partners form an enduring pair bond and display complex attachment behaviors, such as social monogamy and biparental care. Using the prairie vole as a model system for the molecular genetic analysis of social attachment behaviors, we seek to determine the neural and genetic mechanisms that underlie social attachment behaviors and to determine how genetic and environmental perturbations that correlate with the incidence of ASD affect the function of these circuits to disrupt social bonds.