Evidence map›Paper›PMID 40290195›Full record

ArticleBiological psychiatry global open science2025

Fear Synchrony of Mouse Dyads: Interaction of Sex Composition and Stress.

Wataru Ito, Andrew Holmes, Alexei Morozov

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Biological psychiatry global open science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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2 · The registry

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

  1. Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Wataru ItoFralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion, Roanoke, Virginia.
Andrew HolmesLaboratory of Behavioral and Genomic Neuroscience, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.
Alexei MorozovFralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion, Roanoke, Virginia.

Funding

Observational fear enhanced plasticity in dmPFC-BLA circuit as a modulator of affective behaviorsR01MH120290 · NIMH · VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INST AND ST UNIV · PI MOROZOV, ALEXEI · 2019 to 2023
$2.0M
Sex Difference in the Integration of Visual Social Stimulus and Emotional Auditory StimulusR21MH137592 · NIMH · VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INST AND ST UNIV · PI MOROZOV, ALEXEI · 2024 to 2025
$440k
NIMH NIH HHS R01 MH120290NIMH NIH HHS R21 MH137592
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Background: Socially coordinated threat responses support a group's survival. Given the distinct social roles of each sex, social coordination can differ between males and females and mixed-sex groups. We investigated how the sex composition of mouse dyads affected one form of social coordination, the synchronization of conditioned freezing, and assessed how emotional state and social context influenced synchronization by exposure to stress and altering the partner's familiarity, respectively. Methods: Mice were fear conditioned individually to an auditory stimulus and tested in same- or opposite-sex dyads with familiar or unfamiliar partners. Independent cohorts were tested after 5 minutes of restraint stress or with prefrontal inactivation by muscimol. Time-series data on freezing bouts were used to compute the synchrony index, freezing properties, and state transitions based on a Markov model. Results: In same-sex dyads, males exhibited higher synchrony than females. State transition analysis revealed sex-specific synchronization strategies: Males maintained a congruent freezing state primarily by following their partners' state transitions, whereas females did so by reversing their own. Stress disrupted synchrony in males, which was prevented by prefrontal inactivation, while stress enhanced synchrony in females. Partner's unfamiliarity reduced synchrony in males but had no effect on females. Conversely, opposite-sex dyads exhibited high levels of synchrony and a unique resilience to stress and unfamiliarity without preferred synchronization strategies. Conclusions: Mice display sex composition-specific synchronization of threat response and its modulation by stress and social context, providing insights into neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by abnormal threat responses in social contexts with same- and opposite-sex groups.

Indexed as

AffiliationDefensive behaviorFear conditioningMouseSocially coordinated behaviorSynchronization

Identifiers

PMID40290195
PMCPMC12032872

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
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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.