Behavioral paradigms for studying affective state discrimination in mice

UEHARA, JUAN MARTIN; BELFORTE, JUAN EMILIO; BELLO, ESTEFANIA PILAR

CABA

Congreso; XXXVII SAN Annual Congress; 2022

SAN

The ability to detect and respond to emotional signals during social interactions is crucial to building empathy-based relationships and guiding future behavior in a given environment, thus avoiding imminent threats and finding possible sources of reinforcement. Previous research has shown that this ability is evolutionarily conserved in rodents, which supports the use of murine models of neuropsychiatric disorders associated with alterations in social behavior and emotional processing, such as schizophrenia and autism. The aim of this work is to validate different behavioral assays that allow discriminating between affective states in mice. All these paradigms are based on the interaction of an observer animal with demonstrators subjected to experimental manipulations that alter their emotional state. However, they may differ in the familiarity of the demonstrators presented (cage mate or novel conspecific), the number of animals used (dyads or triads), the type of interaction between them (unidirectional or reciprocal), and the control of other parameters such as dominance or social hierarchy. Validating these paradigms is an important step towards characterizing the social phenotype of a murine model of schizophrenia currently studied in our lab, in which the NMDA receptor is postnatally ablated in GABAergic interneurons of the cortex and hippocampus.