The effects of chronic social defeat stress on mouse self-grooming behavior and its patterning

• Published in: Behavioural brain research Vol. 208; no. 2; pp. 553 - 559
• Main Authors: Denmark, Ashley, Tien, David, Wong, Keith, Chung, Amanda, Cachat, Jonathan, Goodspeed, Jason, Grimes, Chelsea, Elegante, Marco, Suciu, Christopher, Elkhayat, Salem, Bartels, Brett, Jackson, Andrew, Rosenberg, Michael, Chung, Kyung Min, Badani, Hussain, Kadri, Ferdous, Roy, Sudipta, Tan, Julia, Gaikwad, Siddharth, Stewart, Adam, Zapolsky, Ivan, Gilder, Thomas, Kalueff, Allan V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Shannon Elsevier B.V 02-04-2010; Elsevier
• Subjects: Animals; Behavior, Animal; Behavioral organization; Behavioral psychophysiology; Biological and medical sciences; Chronic Disease; Chronic social defeat; Dominance-Subordination; Exploratory Behavior - physiology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grooming; Grooming - physiology; Male; Mice; Mice, Inbred C57BL; Numerical Analysis, Computer-Assisted; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Statistics, Nonparametric; Stress; Stress, Psychological - physiopathology; Behavioral organization; Mice; Grooming; Chronic social defeat; Stress; Grooming behavior; Rodentia; Self; Vertebrata; Chronic; Mammalia; Mouse; Animal
• ISSN: 0166-4328; 1872-7549
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bbr.2009.12.041

Stress induced by social defeat is a strong modifier of animal anxiety and depression-like phenotypes. Self-grooming is a common rodent behavior, and has an ordered cephalo-caudal progression from licking of the paws to head, body, genitals and tail. Acute stress is known to alter grooming activity levels and disrupt its patterning. Following 15–17 days of chronic social defeat stress, grooming behavior was analyzed in adult male C57BL/6J mice exhibiting either dominant or subordinate behavior. Our study showed that subordinate mice experience higher levels of anxiety and display disorganized patterning of their grooming behaviors, which emerges as a behavioral marker of chronic social stress. These findings indicate that chronic social stress modulates grooming behavior in mice, thus illustrating the importance of grooming phenotypes for neurobehavioral stress research.