Face pictures reduce behavioural, autonomic, endocrine and neural indices of stress and fear in sheep

摘要: Faces are highly emotive stimuli and we find smiling or familiar faces both attractive comforting, even as young babies. Do other species with sophisticated face recognition skills, such sheep, also respond to the emotional significance of faces? We report that when sheep experience social isolation, sight pictures compared those goats inverted triangles significantly reduces behavioural (activity protest vocalizations), autonomic (heart rate) endocrine (cortisol adrenaline) indices stress. They increase mRNA expression activity-dependent genes (c-fos zif/268) in brain regions specialized for processing (temporal medial frontal cortices basolateral amygdala) control (orbitofrontal cingulate cortex), reduce their associated stress responses (hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus) fear (central lateral amygdala). Effects on recognition, centres restricted right hemisphere. Results provide evidence may be useful relieving caused by unavoidable isolation possibly animal species, including humans. The finding like humans, appear have a hemisphere involvement negative experiences suggests functional lateralization emotion systems general feature mammals.