Social behaviors

Recent articles

Two prairie voles.

Oxytocin prompts prairie voles to oust outsiders, fortifying their friendships

The “love hormone” drives the neurobiology behind platonic bonds in animals usually studied for their romantic attachments.

By Holly Barker
8 August 2025 | 8 min listen
Two mice sleeping.

Soft touch quells loneliness in mice

Touch modulates one of two dueling types of hypothalamic neurons that, thermostat-like, balance an animal’s drive for social interaction.

By Angie Voyles Askham
26 February 2025 | 6 min read
A young child in a blue shirt sits in a red chair and speaks to an adult at the edge of the frame.

AI tool estimates social ability by analyzing speech

The system’s code and training data—drawn from one of the largest databases of speech recordings from autistic people—are openly available.

By Charles Q. Choi
13 February 2025 | 5 min read

Explore more from The Transmitter

A red pencil sits on top of a stack of white papers.

Contested paper on vaccines, autism in rats retracted by journal

The editor-in-chief cited “inconsistencies in the number of subjects” as the reason for the retraction.

By Marta Hill
7 August 2025 | 5 min listen

Body state, sensory signals commingle in mouse whisker cortex

The new study challenges a long-held view that the barrel cortex exclusively encodes sensory signals from the whiskers.

By Claudia López Lloreda
6 August 2025 | 6 min listen
Book cover for Bird Brains and Behavior: A Synthesis, showing several bird species.

‘Bird Brains and Behavior,’ an excerpt

In their new book, published today, Georg Striedter and Andrew Iwaniuk dive deep into the latest research on the neural mechanisms of avian behavior. This excerpt from Chapter 2 explores how birds sleep.

By Andrew Iwaniuk, Georg Striedter
5 August 2025 | 9 min read