Recently, a group of researchers from Institute of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences found that exposing male mice to social defeat stress, a mimicry of chronic stress, tended their behavior toward the habitual behavior rather than goal-directed one. Dr. Liang Jing and her colleagues discovered that this alteration in the behavior could be regulated to the normal state utilizing corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) receptor of type 1 (CRFR1) placed within the infralimbic (IL) region of prefrontal cortex (PFC).
PFC is part of brain which is responsible for the cognitive and executive functions. Among the PFC sub-regions, IL has been shown to be responsible for modulating the habitual behavior. On the other hand, CRF system, seems to be candidate number one for adjusting the impairments caused by different types of stress stimuli both within the brain and body.
Using devaluation test Dr. Liang’s group revealed that mice previously exposed to chronic stress did not care about the way they could get the reward. In devaluation test, animals were trained to get reward (food or sugar) in a fixed ratio or variable intervals by poking their nose on a fixed spot. The results from her lab displayed a habitual attitude in stressed mice.
Interestingly, they found that this impairment could be treated and turned back to the goal-directed behavior using CRFR1 antagonist, NBI 27914. It seems that NBI 27914 regulates the CRFR1 activity. In this situation, goal-directed behavior, as was previously impaired by chronic stress, displays syndrome of normal mice in the sense of choice and decision-making.
The findings regarding CRF system in this study are not the final stage for controlling the decision-making. Yet it still is a great milestone in this matter and can give the feature scientists more ideas about the stress therapy, especially the ones impact on decision-making.
This study entitled " Corticotropin-releasing factor receptor 1 in infralimbic cortex modulates social stress-altered decision-making" was published in Progress in Neuropsychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry on Feb 2, 2022 and it was supported by grants from Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Natural Science Foundation of Beijing Municipality and CAS-VPST Silk Road Science Fund 2021. The first author Mirmohammadali Mirramezani Alizamini was supported by 2017 CAS-TWAS President’s Fellowship.
Fig 1. Social defeat treatment and decision-making test. Image was provided by Dr. LIANG Jing.
CONTACT
Ms. LIU Chen
Institute of Psychology Chinese Academy of Sciences
Beijing 100101, China.
E-mail: liuc@psych.ac.cn
