Abstract
The corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) system plays a key role in a diversity of behaviors accompanying stress, anxiety and depression. There is also substantial research on relationships between social behaviors and the CRF system in a variety of taxa including fish, birds, rodents, and primates. Some of these relationships are due to the broad role of CRF and urocortins in stress and anxiety, but these peptides also modulate social behavior specifically. For example, the social interaction (SI) test is often used to measure anxiety-like behavior. Many components of the CRF system including CRF, urocortin1, and the R1 receptor have been implicated in SI, via general effects on anxiety as well as specific effects depending on the brain region. The CRF system is also highly responsive to chronic social stressors such as social defeat and isolation. Animals exposed to these stressors display a number of anxiety- and stress-related behaviors, accompanied by changes in specific components the CRF system. Although the primary focus of CRF research on social behavior has been on the deleterious effects of social stress, there are also insights on a role for CRF and urocortins in prosocial and affiliative behaviors. The CRF system has been implicated in parental care, maternal defense, sexual behavior, and pair bonding. Species differences in the ligands and CRF receptors have been observed in vole and bird species differing in social behavior. Exogenous administration of CRF facilitates partner preference formation in monogamous male prairie voles, and these effects are dependent on both the CRF R1 and R2 receptors. These findings are particularly interesting as studies have also implicated the CRF and urocortins in social memory. With the rapid progress of social neuroscience and in understanding the complex structure of the CRF system, the next challenge is in parsing the exact contribution of individual components of this system to specific social behaviors.
Highlights
Many converging lines of evidence implicate the corticotropinreleasing factor (CRF) system in social behavior
No differences were observed in any CRF system-related measures at either 1 day or 1 week of this social stress. These findings suggest that visual information during social stress is sufficient to induce broad changes in the CRF system, but may show a delayed response compared to physical interaction
Exposure to alarm pheromone increases the number of cells in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) double labeled for CRF and c-fos (Kobayashi et al, 2013). These findings suggest that alarm pheromone induces release of CRF from the PVN to modify sexual, and other behaviors, this was found in animals that were tested for sexual behavior prior to tissue collection, so it should be interpreted cautiously
Summary
Many converging lines of evidence implicate the corticotropinreleasing factor (CRF) system in social behavior. This paper will provide a comprehensive review of existing research on this interaction, and aims to identify key areas for future research This is timely as social models are becoming increasingly sophisticated, our understanding of the complexity of the CRF system has evolved substantially, and the contribution of the CRF system to these behaviors has gained significant appreciation. CRF and each of the urocortins have distinct distributions and binding affinities for each receptor and CRFBP, which lends this system to a high degree of complexity and behavioral specificity. Because of this complexity in receptors and ligands, an important caveat to the interpretation of pharmacological studies is that the effects of administration of agonists or antagonists do not implicate just one endogenous ligand or receptor.
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