Social reward requires coordinated activity of nucleus accumbens oxytocin and serotonin

Gül Dölen, Ayeh Darvishzadeh, Kee Wui Huang and Robert C. Malenka ()
Additional contact information
Gül Dölen: Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive
Ayeh Darvishzadeh: Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive
Kee Wui Huang: Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive
Robert C. Malenka: Nancy Pritzker Laboratory, Stanford University School of Medicine, 265 Campus Drive

Nature, 2013, vol. 501, issue 7466, 179-184

Abstract: Abstract Social behaviours in species as diverse as honey bees and humans promote group survival but often come at some cost to the individual. Although reinforcement of adaptive social interactions is ostensibly required for the evolutionary persistence of these behaviours, the neural mechanisms by which social reward is encoded by the brain are largely unknown. Here we demonstrate that in mice oxytocin acts as a social reinforcement signal within the nucleus accumbens core, where it elicits a presynaptically expressed long-term depression of excitatory synaptic transmission in medium spiny neurons. Although the nucleus accumbens receives oxytocin-receptor-containing inputs from several brain regions, genetic deletion of these receptors specifically from dorsal raphe nucleus, which provides serotonergic (5-hydroxytryptamine; 5-HT) innervation to the nucleus accumbens, abolishes the reinforcing properties of social interaction. Furthermore, oxytocin-induced synaptic plasticity requires activation of nucleus accumbens 5-HT1B receptors, the blockade of which prevents social reward. These results demonstrate that the rewarding properties of social interaction in mice require the coordinated activity of oxytocin and 5-HT in the nucleus accumbens, a mechanistic insight with implications for understanding the pathogenesis of social dysfunction in neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism.

Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12518 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:501:y:2013:i:7466:d:10.1038_nature12518

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature12518

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().