Hypothalamic CRH neurons gate rapid social appraisal of conspecifics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SUMMARY Successful navigation of the social environment requires rapid evaluation of conspecifics to distinguish safe from threatening encounters. While the corticotropin-releasing hormone neurons in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (CRH PVN ) are well known for orchestrating endocrine stress responses, their role in real-time social appraisal is unknown. Here, using fibre photometry and optogenetics during ethologically relevant social interactions, we show that CRH PVN neurons exhibit a rapid, transient increase in activity that precedes sniffing, an investigative behaviour through which mice gather social information. This transient signal scales with social context: it is heightened during interactions with unfamiliar and aggressive conspecifics and significantly reduced toward familiar partners. Inhibiting these neurons selectively diminished anogenital sniffing, demonstrating their necessity for optimal social evaluation. Strikingly, across repeated exposures to the same conspecific, behavioural investigation declined while CRH PVN activity remained robust, revealing a dissociation between neuronal and behavioural habituation. This persistence suggests that CRH PVN neurons encode stable neural representation of threat during social encounters. Together, our findings identify CRH PVN neurons as a fast, integrative node linking endocrine stress control to rapid social decision-making.
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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".