In recent years, a growing number of pre-clinical studies have made use of the social abilities of mice, asking how gene variants (e.g., null, transgenic or mutant alleles) give rise to abnormalities in neurodevelopment. Two distinct courses of research provide the foundation for these studies. One course has mostly focused on how we can assess “sociability” using metrics, often automated, to quantitate mouse approach and withdrawal responses to a variety of social stimuli. The other course has focused on psychobiological constructs that underlie the socio-emotional capacities of mice, including motivation, reward and empathy. Critically, we know little about how measures of mouse sociability align with their underlying socio-emotional capacities. In the present work, we compared the expression of sociability in adolescent mice from several strains versus a precisely defined behavioral model of empathy that makes use of a vicarious fear learning paradigm. Despite substantial strain-dependent variation within each behavioral domain, we found little evidence of a relationship between these social phenotypes (i.e., the rank order of strain differences was unique for each test). By contrast, emission of ultrasonic vocalizations was highly associated with sociability, suggesting that these two measures reflect the same underlying construct. Taken together, our results indicate that sociability and vicarious fear learning are not manifestations of a single, overarching social trait. These findings thus underscore the necessity for a robust and diverse set of measures when using laboratory mice to model the social dimensions of neuropsychiatric disorders.

近年来，越来越多的临床前研究利用小鼠的社交能力，探究基因变异（例如无效、转基因或突变等位基因）如何引起神经发育异常。两个不同的研究课程为这些研究提供了基础。一门课程主要关注我们如何使用指标（通常是自动化的）来评估“社交性”，以量化小鼠对各种社交刺激的接近和退缩反应。另一门课程重点关注小鼠社会情感能力的心理生物学结构，包括动机、奖励和同理心。至关重要的是，我们对小鼠社交能力的测量如何与其潜在的社会情感能力相一致知之甚少。在目前的工作中，我们将几种品系的青春期小鼠的社交能力表达与利用替代恐惧学习范​​式的精确定义的同理心行为模型进行了比较。尽管每个行为领域内存在大量的应变依赖性变异，但我们几乎没有发现这些社会表型之间存在关系的证据（即，应变差异的排序对于每个测试都是唯一的）。相比之下，超声波发声的发射与社交能力高度相关，表明这两种测量反映了相同的基本结构。总而言之，我们的结果表明，社交性和替代性恐惧学习并不是单一的、总体的社会特征的表现。因此，这些发现强调了在使用实验室小鼠模拟神经精神疾病的社会维度时需要采取一套强有力且多样化的措施。