Social reward requires coordinated activity of nucleus accumbens oxytocin and serotonin.

ABSTRACT: Social behaviours in species as diverse as honey bees and humans promote group survival but often come at some cost to the individual. Although reinforcement of adaptive social interactions is ostensibly required for the evolutionary persistence of these behaviours, the neural mechanisms by which social reward is encoded by the brain are largely unknown. Here we demonstrate that in mice oxytocin acts as a social reinforcement signal within the nucleus accumbens core, where it elicits a presynaptically expressed long-term depression of excitatory synaptic transmission in medium spiny neurons. Although the nucleus accumbens receives oxytocin-receptor-containing inputs from several brain regions, genetic deletion of these receptors specifically from dorsal raphe nucleus, which provides seroto

SUBMITTER: Dolen G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4091761 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature