Collaborative Research: A new perspective for understanding the varied actions of vasopressin on social development

About This Grant

Social behaviors are integral to the lives of many species and can affect an individual’s ability to survive, thrive, and reproduce. Vasopressin is a neurochemical that influences many types of social behaviors in many species, from communication in electric fish to cooperation in humans. However, vasopressin can influence these social behaviors in conflicting ways, depending on different parameters like age and social context. For example, in birds it can increase aggression for an intruder but also decrease aggression in flocking behaviors. The proposed research will test the hypothesis that vasopressin influences social behavior through its regulation of arousal to social stimuli – that is, how exciting, interesting, or important a social stimulus is to the animal. This research will advance our understanding of how the brain regulates social behavior and provide a framework to guide the development of potential vasopressin treatments for disorders of social development such as autism spectrum disorders. The Broader Impacts of the proposal will provide students with educational and career-building opportunities. The co-PIs will establish a free, online Behavioral Neuroscience conference that will provide undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers from all over the country the opportunity to present their research and network with faculty and other trainees. The co-PI’s will also establish a science exchange between the University of Kentucky (UKY) and University at Buffalo (UB). This will form a lasting connection between the UKY and UB Behavioral Neuroscience communities that will provide students from these institutions with broad scientific training and expanded academic networks. Vasopressin is among the most consistently implicated neurochemicals in social behavior. A survey of the literature, however, reveals great variability in vasopressin actions, even within the same species. Current hypotheses do not fully address this variability in vasopressin’s actions, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding of how vasopressin regulates social behavior. The proposed research tests the hypothesis that vasopressin influences social behaviors through its regulation of arousal. Arousal influences behavior in an inverted-U shaped manner. If vasopressin regulates social arousal, it could increase, decrease, or have no effect on social function depending on dose or interactions with other factors that impact arousal, like age and context. The PIs will use implantable telemetry and pharmacological manipulations to test whether vasopressin's actions on arousal predict its effects on juvenile social play. The PIs will then determine if manipulating vasopressin projections to arousal centers affects juvenile social play, using a new rat model that restricts chemogenetic manipulations to vasopressin cells. Finally, the PIs will measure autonomic, neural, and behavioral arousal responses of juvenile vasopressin-deficient Brattleboro rats to social and non-social stimuli to determine whether vasopressin’s regulation of arousal is specific to social stimuli. The proposed research may provide a unifying framework for understanding vasopressin’s varied actions on social behavior. This project is jointly funded by Neural Systems Cluster and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.