| dc.description.abstract | Stress is a risk factor for many neuropsychiatric disorders. Social transfer of fear is a learning process where individuals develop fear by observing others′ fearful expressions. At the core of this ability is emotional empathy, which involves feeling and distinguishing others′ emotions. Empathy not only helps individuals protect themselves by understanding and avoiding potentially dangerous situations without direct personal contact, but it also plays a crucial role in social cognition. When others encounter difficult situations, individuals can correctly understand others. Emotions and the relationship between emotions and situations to further perform altruistic behaviors. Previous research has found that many patients with neuropsychiatric disorders have deficits in the ability to discern the feelings and pain of others. However, it is still unclear whether stress affects the social transfer of fear, and in particular, there are few clear reports indicating whether the physiological behavior of female animals is more susceptible to the hormone cycle. In this paper, to explore whether various stresses experienced at different life stages affect the social transfer of fear, we divided female mice according to the categories of stress they experienced. Early life stress (ELS) in adulthood and chronic unpredictable stress (CUS) in adulthood, and are divided into four groups: control, early life stress (ELS), chronic unpredictable stress (CUS), and Double stresses (DS). Female mice were exposed to 13 days of early life stress starting on the second day of life and 14 days of chronic unpredictable stress as adults. We found that female mice experiencing chronic unpredictable stress experienced weight loss and increased adrenal gland weight, indicating that female mice are indeed subjected to physiological changes caused by chronic unpredictable stress. In fear social transfer, we subjected strange mice that had never experienced stress (Naïve) to electric shock and observed the behavior of the above four groups of female mice under the electric shock. The results showed that female mice that had experienced double stress had shorter freezing time than other groups, indicating that the double-stressed mice were unable to feel the fearful emotions expressed by unfamiliar mice, and were unable to associate fearful emotions with the situation. The formation of associative memory and the lack of observational fear learning ability. Due to the lack of relevant research on female mice, we further compared the neuronal activity in brain areas related to fear social transfer using male mice. After the fear social transfer test, we collected brain tissue and sliced it, using immunofluorescence staining and selecting c-Fos as a marker of neuron activity to explore whether stress affects the activation of nerve cells in these related brain areas. We observed the amount of c-Fos in the basolateral amygdala (BLA), ventral hippocampus (VHP), and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of female mice in each group. There is no statistically significant difference. Based on the above results, this study shows that the lack of stress-induced fear social transfer in female mice may have nothing to do with the relevant brain circuits in male mice or there may be sex differences. | en_US |