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Mount Sinai Researchers Discover Heightened Activity of Specific Brain Cells Following Traumatic Social Experience Blocks Social Reward and Promotes Sustained Social Avoidance That Can Contribute to Psychiatric Disorders

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Past social trauma is encoded by a population of stress/threat-responsive brain cells that become hyperactivated during subsequent interaction with non-threatening social targets. As a consequence, previously rewarding social targets are now perceived as social threats, which promotes generalized social avoidance and impaired social reward processing that can contribute to psychiatric disorders, according to a study conducted in mice by researchers at the Brain and Body Research Center at Mount Sinai and published November 30 in Nature.

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