Fear Synchrony of Mouse Dyads: Interaction of Sex Composition and Stress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. 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. 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. 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. Many social organisms, including humans, synchronize emotional responses to threats. A behavioral paradigm, which captures fear synchronization in mouse dyads, revealed that sex composition of the dyad determines how the 2 animals synchronize. In same-sex dyads, males synchronized more than females and followed their partner behavioral transitions whereas females reversed their own behaviors. Stress and partner unfamiliarity lowered male synchronization, but stress increased synchronization in females. Opposite-sex dyads synchronized strongly regardless of stress or familiarity and showed no specific strategy. These findings demonstrate that sex determines fear synchronization depending on the emotional and social context.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| 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 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".