40 documents found, page 1 of 4
Oxytocin and social isolation: Nonapeptide regulation of social homeostasis
Kareklas, Kyriacos; Oliveira, Rui F.Social isolation imposes physiological and behavioural effects that can have a severe impact on health, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. We reason that mechanisms responsible for the motivation to interact with others and the cognitive assessment of social interactions also mediate the effects of the lack of social interactions. This is because social isolation stress depends on the abili...
Emotional contagion and prosocial behaviour in fish: An evolutionary and mechan...
Kareklas, Kyriacos; Oliveira, Rui F.In this review, we consider the definitions and experimental approaches to emotional contagion and prosocial behaviour in mammals and explore their evolutionary conceptualisation for studying their occurrence in the evolutionarily divergent vertebrate group of ray-finned fish. We present evidence for a diverse set of fish phenotypes that meet definitional criteria for prosocial behaviour and emotional contagion...
Autism-associated gene shank3 is necessary for social contagion in zebrafish
Kareklas, Kyriacos; Teles, Magda C; Dreosti, Elena; Oliveira, Rui F.Background Animal models enable targeting autism-associated genes, such as the shank3 gene, to assess their impact on behavioural phenotypes. However, this is often limited to simple behaviours relevant for social interaction. Social contagion is a complex phenotype forming the basis of human empathic behaviour and involves attention to the behaviour of others for recognizing and sharing their emotional or affe...
Social and asocial learning in zebrafish are encoded by a shared brain network ...
Pinho, Adriano Bastos; Cunliffe, Vincent; Kareklas, Kyriacos; Petri, Giovanni; Oliveira, Rui F.Group living animals use social and asocial cues to predict the presence of reward or punishment in the environment through associative learning. The degree to which social and asocial learning share the same mechanisms is still a matter of debate. We have used a classical conditioning paradigm in zebrafish, in which a social (fish image) or an asocial (circle image) conditioned stimulus (CS) have been paired w...
Evolutionarily conserved role of oxytocin in social fear contagion in zebrafish
Akinrinade, Ibukun; Kareklas, Kyriacos; Teles, Magda C; Reis, Thais K.; Gliksberg, Michael; Petri, Giovanni; Levkowitz, Gil; Oliveira, Rui F.Emotional contagion is the most ancestral form of empathy. We tested to what extent the proximate mechanisms of emotional contagion are evolutionarily conserved by assessing the role of oxytocin, known to regulate empathic behaviors in mammals, in social fear contagion in zebrafish. Using oxytocin and oxytocin receptor mutants, we show that oxytocin is both necessary and sufficient for observer zebrafish to imi...
Sex differences in aggression are paralleled by differential activation of the ...
Scaia, Maria Florencia; Akinrinade, Ibukun; Petri, Giovanni; Oliveira, Rui F.Although aggression is more prevalent in males, females also express aggressive behaviors and in specific ecological contexts females can be more aggressive than males. The aim of this work is to assess sex differences in aggression and to characterize the patterns of neuronal activation of the social-decision making network (SDMN) in response to intra-sexual aggression in both male and female zebrafish. Adult ...
Interaction between vasotocin and gonadal hormones in the regulation of reprodu...
Almeida, Olinda; Félix, Ana Sofia; Oliveira, Rui F.Vasotocin (VT) has been associated with the regulation of diferent aspects of social behavior (e.g., mating and aggression). Given the fact that androgens are also known to regulate reproductive behavior, we hypothesized that VT and androgens could be interacting, rather than acting independently, in the regulation of reproductive behavior. In the present study, we aimed to understand the efect of VT and its in...
Differential effects of food restriction and warming in the two-spotted goby: i...
Lopes, Ana F.; Murdoch, Robyn; Martins-Cardoso, Sara; Madeira, Carolina; Costa, Pedro M.; Félix, Ana S.; Oliveira, Rui F.; Bandarra, Narcisa M.Climate change is a growing threat to marine organisms and ecosystems, and it is already modifying ocean properties by, for example, increasing temperature and decreasing pH. Increasing water temperature may also lead to an impairment of primary productivity and an overall depletion of available zooplankton. Understanding how the crossover between warming and zooplankton availability impacts fish populations ha...
Expanding the concept of social behavior to interspecific interactions
Oliveira, Rui F.; Bshary, RedouanIn pretty much any species, an individual's survival and reproduction depends crucially on the outcome of interactions with other individuals. Key interactions may take place between individuals of the same species but also between individuals belonging to different species. However, the most accepted definition of social behavior only considers interactions between conspecifics. Here, we argue that the distinc...
Stressor controllability modulates the stress response in fish
Cerqueira, Marco; Millot, Sandie; Silva, Tomé; Félix, Ana S.; Castanheira, Maria Filipa; Rey, Sonia; MacKenzie, Simon; Oliveira, Gonçalo A.Background In humans the stress response is known to be modulated to a great extent by psychological factors, particularly by the predictability and the perceived control that the subject has of the stressor. This psychological dimension of the stress response has also been demonstrated in animals phylogenetically closer to humans (i.e. mammals). However, its occurrence in fish, which represent a divergent vert...