Witness Social Stress in Rats: A Guide to the Use of an Inclusive Social Stress Paradigm in Behavioral Neuroscience

The social defeat paradigm has been instrumental in forming our understanding of the neurobiology relevant to social stress-related disorders. However, the classic procedure is limited by the difficulty in distinguishing between the physical and psychological component of social defeat stress and its limited applicability to female rodents and different age-groups. In this chapter, we describe a refinement of this paradigm, the so-called “witness social stress” model, where the experimental rodent experiences the sensory and psychological components of aggression between two male conspecifics from the safety of an adjacent compartment within the same cage. This protocol variant not only mitigates the confounding variables associated with the physical component of social defeat, but also allows the inclusion of rodents of both sexes and different age-groups. In this chapter, we outline the methodology for implementing this paradigm in rats and highlight the utility of the witness social stress model for elucidating central and peripheral processes of social stress-related vulnerabilities in a more comprehensive way.