Slashdot Mirror
Bullying Affects Social Status?
An anonymous reader wrote to mention a ScienceDaily article about the social status effects of bullying on mice and men. From the article: "The results reveal neural mechanisms by which social learning is shaped by psychosocial experience and how antidepressants act in this particular brain circuit. They also suggest new strategies for treating mood disorders such as depression, social phobia and post-traumatic stress disorder, in which social withdrawal is a prominent symptom ... He and his colleagues also discovered that social defeat triggered an upheaval in gene expression in the target area of the circuit, the nucleus accumbens, located deep in the front part of the brain -- 309 genes increased in expression while 17 decreased."
This article is saying that being bullied leads to social discouragement. This leads to social self-estrangement -- the person (mouse, actually, but by extensions it may apply to humans) who has been bullied repeatedly eventually gives up trying to form social relationships and becomes more of a hermit.
The implications are that this is a neurochemical change because some of the effects of this discouragement can be reversed either by genetic differences or by anti-depressents that probably repress the mechanisms that change the brain chemistry towards social isolationism.
---- I'm out of your mind!
That is because this slashdot-linked review is an over-simplification of the actual study. The mice lacking the gene probably have lost the ability to remember they were subjected to aggression previously. That is they are behaving naively. They aren't kissing up, they just don't know they were picked on previously. You should read the F study RTFS http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;311 /5762/864 but your conclusion is supported by the article, from what I can see, maybe the article should RTFS.