Cell and Systems Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON L5L1C6, Canada.
Dept. of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, ON L5L1C6, Canada.
Neuroscience. 2021 Jun 1;464:26-32. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2020.12.017. Epub 2020 Dec 30.
Gentle stroking, a type of affective touch that holds hedonic and rewarding value, is critical to our daily inter-individual communication. This positive socio-emotional aspect of touch is conveyed through a subclass of C afferents known as C-Tactile fibers in humans with an analogous system in rodents proposed. Here, we describe a novel tactile conditioned place preference paradigm using mice and demonstrate that gentle stroking by an experimenter is rewarding. In order to investigate the relationship between tactile preference and innate sociability, mice were subjected to the classic three-chambered test of social approach, where mice displayed significant preference towards the experimenter's hand. These findings suggest that gentle stroking evoked by an experimenter can play an important role in reward and preference and establish an affiliative relationship between mice and humans. Future research can potentially use this model to examine fiber type involvement and elucidate the significance of these findings for activation of the reward system.
轻抚，一种具有愉悦和奖赏价值的情感性触摸，对我们的日常人际交流至关重要。触摸的这种积极社会情感方面通过人类中的一类被称为 C 触觉纤维的 C 类传入纤维来传递，而啮齿动物中也提出了类似的系统。在这里，我们描述了一种使用小鼠的新型触觉条件性位置偏好范式，并证明实验者的轻柔抚摸具有奖赏作用。为了研究触觉偏好与天生社交性之间的关系，我们让小鼠接受了经典的三箱社交接近测试，结果显示，小鼠对手套的偏爱明显。这些发现表明，实验者引起的轻柔抚摸可以在奖励和偏好中发挥重要作用，并在小鼠和人类之间建立一种亲和关系。未来的研究可能会利用这种模型来研究纤维类型的参与，并阐明这些发现对奖励系统激活的意义。
