Social buffering of stress in a group-living fish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Living in groups affords individuals many benefits, including the opportunity to reduce stress. In mammals, such ‘social buffering’ of stress is mediated by affiliative relationships and production of the neuropeptide oxytocin, but whether these mechanisms facilitate social buffering across vertebrates remains an open question. Therefore, we evaluated whether the social environment influenced the behavioural and physiological recovery from an acute stressor in a group-living cichlid, Neolamprologus pulcher . Individual fish that recovered with their social group displayed lower cortisol levels than individuals that recovered alone. This social buffering of the stress response was associated with a tendency towards lower transcript abundance of arginine vasotocin and isotocin in the preoptic area of the brain, suggesting reduced neural activation of the stress axis. Individuals that recovered with their social group quickly resumed normal behaviour but received fewer affiliative acts following the stressor. Further experiments revealed similar cortisol levels between individuals that recovered in visual contact with their own social group and those in visual contact with a novel but non-aggressive social group. Collectively, our results suggest that affiliation and familiarity per se do not mediate social buffering in this group-living cichlid, and the behavioural and physiological mechanisms responsible for social buffering may vary across vertebrates.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".