Physical Interaction Is Required in Social Buffering Induced by a Familiar Conspecific.

Hou Liu,Ti-Fei Yuan

doi:10.1038/srep39788

Abstract

In social animals, signals released from fearless conspecifics attenuate fear responses, namely social buffering. The presence of conspecific odor can suppress the expression of freezing response of conditioned mice. The present study investigated if physical social experience is required for this social buffering effect. The mice were exposed to donors, donor bedding (collected from cages of donors), or fresh bedding as control, respectively, for 10 days (1 hour daily) in prior to fear conditioning test. The fear expression test was examined in presence of donor bedding. The results showed that only the donor group mice showed reduced freezing time than the other two groups in the fear memory test. This phenomenon indicated that physical interaction might be required for the social buffering effect.

Highlights

In social animals, presence of affiliated conspecifics influence fear responses
The suppression of the fear responses by a familiar conspecific was greater than an unfamiliar one[9]
We investigated that if the prior physical contact is required for the odor based social buffering effect for fear memory expression

Summary

Introduction

Presence of affiliated conspecifics influence fear responses. For instance, signals released from fearful conspecifics aggravated fear responses[1]. Fearless conspecifics could release signals that attenuate fear responses at various levels, including behavioral, autonomic and neural levels[2,3,4], namely social buffering. This buffering effect can be induced either by ‘pair-housing’ after a stressful event, or by ‘pair-exposure’ to an acute stressor with a conspecific animal[5]. The prior physical interaction was required for hamster to discriminate different individuals in across-odor habituation[11,12], but not in single-odor habituation tests[13] These studies indicated that there are two classes of social odor learning in relation to distance-based response pattern[14]. We investigated that if the prior physical contact is required for the odor based social buffering effect for fear memory expression

Methods

Results

Conclusion