What has changed in mama bear brain (well, actually mice) to make her risk her life to attack a potential threat and protect her young? Oxytocin is the key! Happy to share our new study led by two awesome postdocs: Takashi Yamaguchi and Rongzhen Yan. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The neural mechanisms supporting the rise and fall of maternal aggression - Nature

In mice, female aggression is governed by an amygdala–to–medial hypothalamus circuit that is strengthened during pregnancy and is dynamically amplified by oxytocin during lactation.

nature.com

I wrote a Comment on neurotheory, and now you can read it! Some thoughts on where neurotheory has and has not taken root within the neuroscience community, how it has shaped those subfields, and where we theorists might look next for fresh adventures. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

As a Guest Editor for @JoVEJournal, I am organizing a Methods Collection titled “Behavioral and Neural Methods for Exploring Social Behaviors” Interested in contributing? Please reply or submit an abstract here: app.jove.com/methods-coll...

Check out our new review discussing the concepts and neural mechanisms of prosocial helping behavior! 😁 linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii...

Please check out our latest work! It has been a rough year with the passing of Dr. Larry Young. However, I will never forget his kindness and excitement for science. Neural connectivity of oxytocin receptor-expressing neurons in the nuc... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New year new work from the lab! We explore whether aggression experience and observation lead to similar changes in future aggression strategy. (They do!) We perform 2-color imaging across the whole social behavior network across time and track changes www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Aggression experience and observation promote shared behavioral and neural changes

The ability to observe the social behavior of others and use observed information to bias future action is a fundamental building block of social cognition. A foundational question is whether social o...

biorxiv.org

Once more for reviewers in the back: sex differences in behavioral outcomes are very often NOT a product of the estrous cycle and demanding that scientists build estrous metrics into experimental design only shows your own biases about how females (but not males) are primarily hormone-driven.

I’ll never get this lucky again. But incredibly grateful! All thanks to my amazing mentors. 😁

I have begun to curate a list of #neuroendocrinologists (and allied research areas) on this site so we can begin to link up and form a community with critical mass. Let me know if you have any suggestions for additions or would like to be removed from the list. 🤓🧠 bsky.app/profile/did:...

Time for me to start posting here! Check out our Feature Review @ Trends in Neurosciences: "Epigenetic mechanisms underlying sex differences in the brain and behavior" Extremely proud of this piece - we did our best to make it as comprehensive & inclusive as possible! www.cell.com/trends/neuro...