Sentences with phrase «studied prairie voles»

Not exact matches

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

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.

In a study published last fall, researchers showed that male prairie voles that had been separated from their female partners for four days — a much shorter amount of separation time than researchers had previously found to affect the voles» physiology — exhibited depressionlike behavior and had increased levels of corticosterone, the rodent equivalent of the human stress hormone cortisol.

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.

The prairie vole, a small monogamous rodent found in North America, provides a model to study this complex phenomenon.

A study of the effect of alcohol on long - term relationships finds that when a male prairie vole has access to alcohol, but his female partner doesn't, the relationship suffers — similar to what has been observed in human couples.

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.

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.

A new study has shown that prairie voles may be a useful model in understanding the neurochemistry of social behavior.

Therefore, various nontraditional animal models, which display pair bond formation — including marmosets (Callithrix penicillata), titi monkeys (Callicebus cupreus), California mice (Peromyscus californicus), and prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster)-- have emerged as better alternative animal models to study the neural correlates of pair bond formation (Carter et al., 1995; Bester - Meredith et al., 1999; Bales et al., 2007; de Jong et al., 2009; Smith et al., 2010).