Sexually Dimorphic Amygdala Dysfunction in a Mouse Model of Global Cerebral Ischemia

Project Summary How does an animal decide when to help another individual? This question is fundamental to understanding how an individual modifies pro-social behaviors based on the context of a social situation, a feature often disrupted in neuropsychiatric disease. Past rodent research has investigated the mechanisms behind pro-social behavior; however, they focused on paradigms where animals do emotional state-matching or help an individual in distress. Therefore, our fundamental understanding of the mechanisms promoting pro-social behavior is biased towards negative affective states leaving a gap in our understanding of these decisions in positive affective states (e.g. helping others obtain rewards). The amygdala encodes valence, the goodness or badness of a stimuli, and is known to be involved in social decision making in negative affective states. Recent evidence points to amygdala activity being necessary for learning to help a conspecific gain a reward, but how amygdala neurons encode these prosocial decisions is unknown. Furthermore, which amygdala circuits may control these pro-social decisions in a changing social context also remains unknown. Using mice as a model and an established assay for pro-social decision making, this proposal will investigate the hypothesis that functional connectivity of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex flexibly modulates both pro-social helping behavior and individualistic behavior depending on the social context (e.g. conspecifics present). Thus, this study fills an important gap in our knowledge about the neural mechanisms mediating pro-social decision making across social contexts, and how necessary and sufficient functional connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex is to pro social or individualistic behavior.