Amygdala Gene Expression Correlates of Social Behavior in Monkeys Experiencing Maternal Separation

Michael Sabatini · Philip J. Ebert · David A. Lewis · Pat R. Levitt · Judy L. Cameron · Károly Mirnics

125 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Neuroscience

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior Memory and Neural Mechanisms Stress Responses and Cortisol

Abstract

Children exposed to early parental loss from death or separation carry a greater risk for developing future psychiatric illnesses, such as major depression and anxiety. Monkeys experiencing maternal separation at 1 week of age show fewer social behaviors and an increase in self-comforting behaviors (e.g., thumb sucking) over development, whereas in contrast, monkeys experiencing maternal separation at 1 month of age show increased seeking of social comfort later in life. We sought to identify neural systems that may underlie these stress-induced behavioral changes by examining changes in mRNA content in amygdala tissue collected from 1 week separated, 1 month separated, and maternally reared infants at 3 months of age. mRNA from the right medial temporal lobe, primarily the amygdala, was analyzed using Affymetrix U133A 2.0 arrays. One gene, guanylate cyclase 1 alpha 3 (GUCY1A3), showed differential expression between the 1 week and maternally reared groups and the 1 week and 1 month groups; these changes were confirmed by in situ hybridization. The expression of this gene was positively correlated with acute social-comforting behavior (r = 0.923; p = 0.001) and longer-term close social behavior (r = 0.708; p = 0.015) and negatively correlated with self-comforting behaviors (r = -0.88; p < 0.001). Additional in situ hybridization studies of GUCY1A3 in normal monkeys showed that this gene is expressed at adult levels by 1 week of age and that its expression is greater in the amygdala than all other brain areas examined. We conclude that GUCY1A3 may contribute to the altered behavioral phenotypes that are differentially displayed depending on the age at which macaque infants experience an early-life stress.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 125 citations exist upstream.

References

1959Affectional Response in the Infant Monkey 2004Individual Differences in Trait Anxiety Predict the Response of the Basolateral Amygdala to Unconsciously Processed Fearful Faces 1998A Three Year Follow-Up of Attachment and Indiscriminate Friendliness in Children Adopted from Romanian Orphanages 1999Environment and vulnerability to major psychiatric illness: a case control study of early parental loss in major depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia 2002The Social Brain: A Project for Integrating Primate Behavior and Neurophysiology in a New Domain 2000Attachment Disorder Behavior Following Early Severe Deprivation: Extension and Longitudinal Follow-up 2003Are There Biological Programming Effects for Psychological Development? Findings From a Study of Romanian Adoptees.2004Neural correlates of speech anticipatory anxiety in generalized social phobia.

Cited by

2014Mothers’ unresolved trauma blunts amygdala response to infant distress 2008The development of antisocial behavior: What can we learn from functional neuroimaging studies?2008Non-Human Primates: Model Animals for Developmental Psychopathology 2016Sensitive Periods of Emotion Regulation: Influences of Parental Care on Frontoamygdala Circuitry and Plasticity

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.