Mapping the neural dynamic of social dominance and defeat

Persistent social internal states including social dominance and subordination are generated and stabilized through first-hand experiences of aggression and defeat.   The Falkner lab explores how representations of aggression and defeat are encoded in the brain’s subcortical “social behavior network”, and how these representations are updated with experience.  Using both task-based approaches and high-throughput quantification of free social interactions, we focus on how nodes in this network transform social motivation to social action, to generate both “proactive” and  “reactive” aggressive behaviors, and how differences in aggressive behavior during defeat lead to individual differences in persistent social internal states.

Annegret Falkner's World Wide Neuroforum