Understand the neural mechanism underlying aggressive motivation

 描述（由申请人提供）：攻击是无脊椎动物和脊椎动物物种的一种先天社会行为。对大多数人来说，侵略性是保护他们的 资源，并确保在出现干扰时繁殖成功。然而，对某些人来说，攻击似乎是快乐的来源。许多例子表明，从鱼类到灵长类动物，一系列物种中的某些个体会自愿寻找机会进行攻击性行为。对人类来说，欺凌、跟踪和性掠夺是对我们的社会产生负面影响的多种形式的寻求攻击行为之一。抑制攻击寻求行为的治疗将特别有用，因为它们可以防止潜在的攻击行为，而不会损害一般的社会，认知和运动能力。不幸的是，很少有人知道什么大脑活动促进了攻击寻求行为，因此目前没有治疗方法可以专门抑制攻击动机。为了应对这一知识缺口，我们的研究试图了解攻击性冲动是如何在大脑中出现的。在我们以前的研究中，我们确定了腹内侧下丘脑（VMHvl）的腹外侧部分是必不可少的男性之间的攻击。尽管VMHvl的激活诱导对雄性和雌性同种的急性攻击，但VMHvl的抑制减少了自然的雄性间攻击。然而，目前尚不清楚VMHvl是否仅控制攻击的运动表达，或者也决定了感觉独立的攻击寻求行为。为了解决这个问题，我们设计了一个“自我发起的侵略”（SIA）的任务，使我们能够暂时分开的寻求阶段和行动阶段的侵略。在任务过程中，动物学会主动戳鼻子，以接近他们可以攻击的较弱入侵者。使用这个任务，我们发现VMHvl活性可以实质上调节小鼠的攻击动机。在这项研究中，我们将跟进这些初步的研究结果，并检查自然VMHvl细胞活动在SIA任务期间在单细胞和群体水平。通过本研究 我们希望能为攻击性动机的神经起源提供一些新的线索。

 DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Aggression is an innate social behavior across invertebrate and vertebrate species. For most individuals, aggression is essential to protect their resources and ensure reproductive success when interference arises. However, for some individuals, aggression appears to be a source of pleasure. Many examples show that certain individuals across a range of species, from fish to primates, will voluntarily seek out the opportunity to engage in aggressive actions. For humans, bullying, stalking, and sexual predation are among the many forms of aggression-seeking behaviors that negatively affect our society. Treatments that suppress aggression-seeking behaviors would be especially useful given that they could prevent potential aggressive actions without compromising general social, cognitive, and motor abilities. Unfortunately, little is known about what brain activity promotes the aggression-seeking behavior and consequently no treatment is currently available to specifically suppress aggressive motivation. In response to this knowledge gap, our studies seek to understand how the aggressive impulses emerge in the brain. In our previous studies, we identified the ventrolateral part of the ventromedial hypothalamus (VMHvl) as being indispensable for inter-male attack. Whereas activation of the VMHvl induces acute attack towards both male and female conspecifics, suppression of the VMHvl reduces natural inter-male attack. However, it remains unclear whether the VMHvl only controls the motor expression of attack or also determines sensory-independent aggression- seeking behaviors. To address this question, we designed a "self-initiated aggression" (SIA) task that allows us to temporarily separate the seeking phase and the action phase of aggression. During the task, the animal learns to voluntarily nose poke to gain access to a weaker intruder that they can attack. Using this task, we found that the VMHvl activity can substantially modulate the aggressive motivation in mice. In this study we will follow up on these initial findings and examine the natural VMHvl cell activity during the SIA task at both the single-cell and population levels. Through this study we hope to shed some new light onto the neural origin of aggressive motivation.