Abstract
Individuals’ social contexts are broadly recognized to impact both their psychology and neurobiology. These effects are observed in people and in nonhuman animals who are the subjects for comparative and translational science. The social contexts in which monkeys are reared have long been recognized to have significant impacts on affective processing. Yet, the social contexts in which monkeys live as adults are often ignored and could have important consequences for interpreting findings, particularly those related to biopsychiatry and behavioral neuroscience studies. The extant nonhuman primate neuropsychological literature has historically tested individually-housed monkeys, creating a critical need to understand how social context might impact the outcomes of such experiments. We evaluated affective responding in adult rhesus monkeys living in four different social contexts using two classic threat processing tasks—a test of responsivity to objects and a test of responsivity to an unfamiliar human. These tasks have been commonly used in behavioral neuroscience for decades. Relative to monkeys with full access to a social partner, individually-housed monkeys had blunted reactivity to threat and monkeys who had limited contact with their partner were more reactive to some threatening stimuli. These results indicate that monkeys’ social housing contexts impact affective reactivity and point to the potential need to reconsider inferences drawn from prior studies in which the impacts of social context have not been considered.
Highlights
Individuals’ social contexts are broadly recognized to impact both their psychology and neurobiology
Following the logic that limiting social conditions could impact monkeys’ affective processing, it is possible that social contexts in which adults are living could influence how control animals behave and, influence the interpretation of the effects of manipulations
Despite many decades of use in neuropsychological experiments, the social contexts in which adult monkeys live and the impacts that these contexts may have on behavioral responses in tasks commonly used to assess psychosocial behavior have historically gone unacknowledged
Summary
Individuals’ social contexts are broadly recognized to impact both their psychology and neurobiology. We evaluated affective responding in adult rhesus monkeys living in four different social contexts using two classic threat processing tasks—a test of responsivity to objects and a test of responsivity to an unfamiliar human These tasks have been commonly used in behavioral neuroscience for decades. Nonhuman primates are used extensively in psychological and psychiatric neuroscience research[5–7] because of their psychological and biological homologies with h umans[8–10] Such studies often include neurobiological manipulations like lesioning particular brain regions or neural connections (e.g., s ee[11] for a review of studies on the amygdala) and, more recently, genetic manipulations (e.g., s ee[12] for a review). Much of the literature on the effects of social context in monkeys has focused on developmental context—that is, how infant and juvenile monkeys’ social environment influences psychosocial processing (see[31] for an early review)—there is increasing evidence that variation in social housing impacts adult monkeys as well[32,33]
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