Changes in the Social Behavior of Male CBA/Lac Mice in Response to Agonistic Interactions

Abstract

The ability to interact and communicate with each other is a necessary component of social behavior and the normal development of community-living individuals. Severe impairments to communicative behavior can result from the development of autism which, appearing mostly in childhood, is characterized by degraded socialization, low levels of communicativeness, and restricted, repetitive behavior. However, the large increase in the occurrence of autistic symptomatology in humans in recent years suggests a role for the environment. The aim of the present work was to study changes in the social behavior of male CBA/Lac mice after repeated experience of aggression and defeats in daily antagonistic interactions. The emphasis on analysis of the data was on seeing similarities in changes in the social behavior of the animals of this strain as compared with another, previously studied, strain – C57BL/6J – in an analogous experiment. Male mice with alternative types of social behavior of both strains displayed similar changes in social behavior, though the extents of changes in some forms of behavior were different in animals of different strains. The data obtained here provide evidence that prolonged living in a hostile environment was accompanied by changes in social behavior analogous to symptoms of autistic spectrum disorder.