Biologists have studied the effects of isolation on animal behavior.
This is not the first similar study: such topics were raised by the scientific community before, and after the pandemic, when millions of people were in isolation, and these issues became especially relevant.
At the same time, experts watched laboratory mice. A person calls the «speech» of rodents «squeak», but this is only a small part of the sounds they have made.
In fact, mice and rats communicate with the help of ultrasound: the first to be discovered by a professor at the same University John W. Anderson back in 1954.
His work was continued, and his young colleagues became interested in how mice would speak on their ultrasound when they find themselves in social isolation.
These sounds, inaccessible to the human ear, are neither a speech nor a language in the world of mice. This is a kind of analog of laughter, crying, or sigh, symbolizing the emotional states of rodents.
The study of these reactions in mice will help to better understand how the same process occurs in people.
After three days of isolation, the guests for half an hour sat down to mice, and the researchers recorded the reaction taking into account the parameters of the floor, age, and social experience of the experimental participant.
Researchers believed that vocalization and other activity would increase after isolation, but the results were not quite the same as they expected. The behavior of males practically did not change, regardless of whether their visitor was a male or a female.
On the other hand, females after three days of loneliness became four times more «talkative» than participants in the control group: mice with the same initial parameters that remained in groups.
Having recorded behavioral changes, experts will study the appropriate changes at the level of functioning of neurons: this knowledge can be useful for understanding factors that contribute to individual differences in susceptibility to social isolation.
In addition, this can help in the treatment of such disorders as anxiety and depression.
