Sentences with phrase «prairie voles»

The team chose to study pair - bonding in prairie voles because they are one of the few species that mate for life.

Several years later, Tom Insel, a former colleague of Carter's who is now president of the National Institute of Mental Health, began a comparative study analyzing the brains of prairie voles and their less monogamous cousins, the montane voles.

For example, the overexpression of the V1aR in the ventral pallidum results in a strong partner preference formation in male prairie voles even in the absence of mating (Pitkow et al., 2001).

In the early 1990s, studies of monogamous prairie voles showed oxytocin helped promote lasting attachments.

Are some of us walking around with prairie vole brains and others are stuck with the wandering eye of a montane vole?

Oxytocin helps keep female prairie voles bonded with their partners.

So when prairie voles mate, their bodies produce vasopressin, which causes their brains to reward the vole couple with a flood of pleasurable emotions, sealing the social bond.

Strong interpersonal relationships have been shown to ward off drug addiction, and new clues as to why come from prairie voles — rodents that form long - term, monogamous bonds with their mates.

Research on prairie voles suggests that it's possible to predict which voles will exhibit pair - bonding behavior just by looking for those expressing the gene for AVPR1a, a specific vasopressin receptor.

Although scientists have observed the behavioral and chemical side of prairie vole love, the neural networks behind commitment are still a mystery.

A few years ago, scientists looked into what made prairie voles so family - friendly and monogamous — one of the fewer than 5 percent of mammals that stick with its mate for life — when its cousin, the meadow vole, acts like a Don Juan, mating with as many females as possible and is clueless about raising its own children.

Robert Liu at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his colleagues chose to study pair - bonding in prairie voles because this species is one of the few to mate for life.

Hey, that sounds sort of like prairie voles and meadow voles.

The same is true for prairie voles, one of the few mammals that form long - term monogamous pairs.

Their lives may be short — they're an easy snack for hawks and snakes — but once two prairie voles mate, they are bonded until the end.

To find out, Ryabinin and Andre Walcott, also at OHSU, studied prairie voles.

For example, Young's research shows normally monogamous prairie voles do not develop pair bonds with their mates if their mu - opioid system is blocked; other studies have found that mice genetically engineered to have no mu - opioid receptors do not prefer their mothers to other mice the way normal baby mice do.

Just look at prairie voles and marmosets.

«Remarkably, prairie voles seem more monogamous than people,» she says.

They saw that when male prairie voles interacted with their special lady vole, neuronal activity in the nucleus accumbens jumped 20 % compared with when they interacted with a random female.

Young's team has also shown that blocking corticotropin - releasing factor (CRF), a hormone involved in the stress response, stops the depressive behaviour that prairie voles exhibit when their partner dies.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS — When prairie voles choose a mate, there's no turning back — the «love chemical» oxytocin increases in their brains and they devote themselves to only each other.

These results indicate that discordant drinking can directly affect prairie voles» relationships.

In prairie vole society, sex is the prelude to pair bonding between a male and a female.

A new theory that has sprung from research on prairie voles says that at least some of those disparities evolved not to create differences in behaviour or ability, but to prevent them.

It helps to cement the bonds between prairie voles, which mate for life, and triggers the motherly behaviour that sheep show towards their newborn lambs.

Bachelor prairie voles can't tell females of their species apart.

A paper Young published this month, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, found prairie voles that have bonded with a mate not only experience more anxiety when separated from their partners — they also experience more physical pain during the separation, by various measures including response to a painful injection and pain from heat.

Consider the humble prairie vole.

Not only do the faithful prairie voles have more of these receptors than their cheating cousins, but the receptors are located in a part of the brain that's closer to the reward center.

Like humans, animals console each other in times of distress: monkeys hug and kiss, and prairie voles groom each other.

On the contrary, the knockdown of V1aR in the ventral pallidum of male prairie voles causes a deficit in partner preference formation (Barrett et al., 2013).

Characterization of the oxytocin system regulating affiliative behavior in female prairie voles.

qBrain is built on an automated technology platform that will be used to perform similar analyses of other mammalian brains, from prairie voles to marmoset monkeys and humans.

Similar work, based on research with monogamous prairie voles, has been done on the neural mechanisms behind pair - bonding.

Among the questions raised by the discovery is whether male prairie voles in the wild can trigger the crucial circuit without mating, says Elizabeth Hammock at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

«We know much more about the chemistry of attachment and love in prairie voles than we do about that chemistry in humans.

Much of the oxytocin research to date has been done on prairie voles, monogamous rodents that will release oxytocin only when touching a family member, Pollak says.

PAIR - BOND Just 24 hours in each other's company without mating can be enough to bond a pair of prairie voles for life.

As a result, when prairie voles are separated from their partners even for a short time, they experience withdrawal - like symptoms, says Larry Young, a behavioral neuroscientist at Emory University's Yerkes National Primate Research Center and co-author of the study.

In both prairie voles and marmosets, vasopressin jumps after offspring are born and is correlated with nurturing behaviors.

The difference is a protein called the vasopressin receptor, which is ample in the prairie vole but not in the meadow vole.

The highly debated exceptions being prairie voles, wolves and coyotes.

Neuroendocrinologist Sue Carter of the University of Illinois cradles a prairie vole.

There are undeniable interactions between oxytocin and opioids, and the prairie vole's brain anatomy suggests a strong connection between dopamine and oxytocin.

Load up on adrenaline, or cool down with oxytocin About 20 years ago, neuroendocrinologist Sue Carter began examining the brains of prairie voles to understand why the small rodent indigenous to the midwestern plains of the United States is one of the natural world's great romantics.

It can be daunting to think that the core ingredients of that glue are shared by humans and prairie voles.

The architecture suggested that behaviors associated with oxytocin release would feel good in the brains of the prairie voles but leave the montane voles relatively unaffected.

Like those of the monogamous prairie vole, human oxytocin receptors are located in several dopamine - rich regions of the brain, suggesting that oxytocin is embedded in our reward circuitry.