* Neural control of affiliative touch in prosocial interaction.
- The ability to help and care for others fosters social cohesiveness and is vital to the physical and emotional well-being of social species, including humans1-3. Affiliative social touch, such as allogrooming (grooming behaviour directed towards another individual), is a major type of prosocial behaviour that provides comfort to others1-6. Affiliative touch serves to establish and strengthen social bonds between animals and can help to console distressed conspecifics. However, the neural circuits that promote prosocial affiliative touch have remained unclear. Here we show that mice exhibit affiliative allogrooming behaviour towards distressed partners, providing a consoling effect. The increase in allogrooming occurs in response to different types of stressors and can be elicited by olfactory cues from distressed individuals. Using microendoscopic calcium imaging, we find that neural activity in the medial amygdala (MeA) responds differentially to naive and distressed conspecifics and encodes allogrooming behaviour. Through intersectional functional manipulations, we establish a direct causal role of the MeA in controlling affiliative allogrooming and identify a select, tachykinin-expressing subpopulation of MeA GABAergic (γ-aminobutyric-acid-expressing) neurons that promote this behaviour through their projections to the medial preoptic area. Together, our study demonstrates that mice display prosocial comforting behaviour and reveals a neural circuit mechanism that underlies the encoding and control of affiliative touch during prosocial interactions.
=>大きくなる, を増す, 増大させる, 強まる, 増加, 増える, 増やす
Overview of noun increase
The noun increase has 5 senses (first 5 from tagged texts)
1. (49) addition, increase, gain -- (a quantity that is added; "there was an addition to property
taxes this year"; "they recorded the cattle's gain in weight over a period of weeks")
2. (21) increase -- (a change resulting in an increase; "the increase is scheduled for next month")
3. (7) increase, increment, growth -- (a process of becoming larger or longer or more numerous or
more important; "the increase in unemployment"; "the growth of population")
4. (3) increase, increment -- (the amount by which something increases; "they proposed an increase
of 15 percent in the fare")
5. (3) increase, step-up -- (the act of increasing something; "he gave me an increase in salary")
Overview of verb increase
The verb increase has 2 senses (first 2 from tagged texts)
1. (86) increase -- (become bigger or greater in amount; "The amount of work increased")
2. (61) increase -- (make bigger or more; "The boss finally increased her salary"; "The university
increased the number of students it admitted")
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