ReviewDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2011
Evaluating the rewarding nature of social interactions in laboratory animals.
Review in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 132 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
132 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Social isolation at adolescence: a systematic review on behaviour related to cocaine, amphetamine and nicotine use in rats and mice.Psychopharmacology · 2021Pooled it
- Article
- Partner separation and sex contribute to anxiety-like behavior, but partner separation alone amplifies hippocampal inflammation following immune challenge.Brain, behavior, and immunity · 2026Article
- Interoceptive Information of Physical Vigor Through Circulating Insulin-Like Growth Factor 1.FASEB bioAdvances · 2026Article
- Early Life Social Isolation Dysregulates Social Reward Processing, BDNF Signaling, and Intracellular Vesicular Sorting in the Nucleus Accumbens of Male and Female Rats.Journal of neurochemistry · 2025Article
- The 3D Vertical Maze: A new model system for studying the interactions between social and spatial cognition.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2025Article
- Operant social seeking to a novel peer after social isolation is associated with activation of nucleus accumbens shell in rats.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Neurexin1α knockout in rats causes aberrant social behaviour: relevance for autism and schizophrenia.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Female rats exposed to early life scarcity-adversity are resilient to later life changes in maternal behavior.Hormones and behavior · 2025Article
- Oxytocin signaling in the ventral tegmental area mediates social isolation-induced craving for social interaction.Journal of biomedical science · 2025Article
- Novel behavioral tasks for the measurement of social motivation in mice: a comparison across strains.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Adolescent morphine exposure does not alter low-dose lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-induced sickness behavior in adult C57/BL6 mice.PloS one · 2025Article
- Moving beyond animal models: enriched environments and human substance use disorders.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Recognising depression in non-human primates: a narrative review of reported signs of depression.PeerJ · 2025Review
- Article
- Interconnected neural circuits mediating social reward.Trends in neurosciences · 2024Review
- Nuancing 'Emotional' Social Play: Does Play Behaviour Always Underlie a Positive Emotional State?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Review
- The effects of different types of social interactions on the electrophysiology of neurons in the nucleus accumbens in rodents.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Social interaction-induced fear memory reduction: exploring the influence of dopamine and oxytocin receptors on memory updating.Translational psychiatry · 2024Article
- The human neuropsychiatric risk gene Drd2 is necessary for social functioning across evolutionary distant species.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
72 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Positive social interactions are essential for emotional well-being, healthy development, establishment and maintenance of adequate social structures and reproductive success of humans and animals. Here, we review the studies that have investigated whether forms of social interaction that occur in different phases of the lifespan of animals, i.e., maternal behavior, social play and sexual interaction are rewarding in rodents and non-human primates. We show that these three forms of social interaction can be used as incentive for place conditioning, lever pressing and maze learning, three setups that have been extensively used to study the rewarding properties of food and drugs of abuse and their neural underpinnings. The experience of positive social interactions during key developmental ages has profound and long-lasting effects on brain function and behavior in emotional, motivational and cognitive domains. For instance, pup interaction is more rewarding than cocaine for early postpartum dams and rats deprived of the opportunity to play during adolescence show social and cognitive impairments at adulthood. Furthermore, sexual behavior is only overtly rewarding when animals can control the rate at which the sexual interaction occurs. Last, we discuss how animal models contributed to our understanding of social reward mechanisms and its psychological components throughout development.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.