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The first of the two papers, Sial et al. was a very easy-read. I love a straight-forward methods paper and thought the concept was interesting approach to modeling PTSD. It would have been nice to see measures of anxiety other than just the elevated plus maze and social interaction task. Something else that they also mention very briefly at the beginning of the paper is the fact that the social hierarchy of the mice that are kept together might have affected the results. This made me think that maybe if the observer mouse had been watching a strange mouse get attacked rather than one of its littermate’s the results would have been significantly different, similar to how if I saw a stranger get beat up vs. my sibling I might respond differently. A limitation Sial et al. mentioned was how they had been unsuccessful getting their experiments to work in females due to attacker mouse being more interested in a female observer rather than attacking the other male. This made sense to me, but a year after this paper came out, a paper entitled “Vicarious Social Defeat Stress Induces Depression-related Outcomes in Female Mice” by Iñiguez et al. (2017)  using the vicarious social defeat stress paradigm with females was released. They provided no explanation for how they got their experiments to work which makes me skeptical but I still thought it was intriguing .
The second paper, Allsop et. al. was multi-faceted. I liked the incorporation of the VSDS into the paper but also thought it was exciting that this paper used a different type of observational learning. I thought the most compelling part of this paper was division of animals in five behavioral groups. When the first started talking about the behavioral, I said aloud “what is they did a group where the animal didn’t receive a shock first?” and a few sentences later there was the naïve observer group.
Overall, these papers were very enjoyable and my favorites of the ones we have read thus far.

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