What Drunk Rodents Can Tell Us About Human Relationships
It seems alcohol makes the heart grow fonder, if you're a female prairie vole. Researchers have found for the time that alcohol effects the brain systems involved in social bonding differently for males and females.
The study was published Monday, April 7, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Because prairie voles are known to mate for life, both in the wild and the lab, the rodents are often used as a model to understand the neurochemistry in human brains that leads us to form lifelong relationships.
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The authors found that the alcohol made the females more likely to pair-bond with their drinking partner than the females that only drank water. Conversely, alcohol made the males less likely to bond with their original partner after the boozy episode.
These differences in behavior seemed to be dictated by changes in the brain to systems involved in social and anxiety-like behaviors — the same ones that dictate the formation of the voles' monogamous relationships.
The researchers note in the paper that the lower likelihood of males to pair bond when drinking is reminiscent of the negative effects of alcohol on long-term attachments and marital happiness in humans — suggesting that there could be a biological element at play.
Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/effects-of-drinking-alcohol-on-bond-formation-in-prairie-voles-2014-4
But do male voles get "beer goggles"?
= new reply since forum marked as read
