A groundbreaking study has identified a brain region in rats that, when stimulated by vitamin B3, makes them less anxious and more socially successful. Share on Pinterest Anxious rats are much less likely to climb the social ladder. It goes without saying that individuals within a society (rats or humans) have differing levels of confidence and anxiety. Some view all new situations as potentially threatening, whereas others might find them exciting or stimulating. The role that anxiety plays in the shuffling of society has long been questioned by sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists alike. Recent research adds some intriguing brain chemistry into the mix. Societies of rats and humans are, obviously, impressively complex. Your ability to thrive, even in the rat world, is dependent on numerous factors, including age, size and previous social experience. Anxiety levels, as we shall see, are also implicated. In rats, it is the least anxious members of a group that climb the auspicious social ladder. Rats with a more anxious bent rarely achieve top social statuses. Additionally, a rat’s well-being is negatively impacted by a low social standing Anxious rats (with some parallels to humans) can enter a negative cycle of so-called social subordination. An individual that cannot compete socially because of their anxiety will only be made to feel more anxious by their repeated failures on that slippery rat ladder.

Anxious rats The current investigation was carried out by Carmen Sandi and her team at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Sandi’s team, investigating the biological basis of social competition and anxiety, aimed to flesh out the links between social success and anxiety. The team started their investigation by ranking the rats by their degree of anxiety traits. They next pitted high-anxiety rats against low-anxiety rats. As expected, high-anxiety rats automatically took on the roles of lower status animals, and vice versa. Anxiety levels seemed to play a key role in the way that the animals behaved around each other. They naturally fell into social strata according to their confidence level. The team at EPFL also measured any biological changes in the animals’ brains. They found some interesting differences in an area known as the nucleus accumbens. The highly anxious individuals showed a marked decrease in the activity of the mitochondria in their nucleus accumbens. Mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell, were observed to produce less ATP (a molecule that transports energy for the cells to use).