Social status is a critical topic in the animal kingdom. Leadership, privileges through status, and the urge to ‘become the alpha’, to lead, are present in many species, from mice to humans.
A study investigating the neurological effects of loss of status in individuals shows that the loss of status experienced by ‘alpha males’ has serious effects.
In the study conducted on mice, symptoms of depression stand out;
Mice live in a systematic hierarchy in their natural lives. Of course, this also applies to mice living in laboratories. The alpha males of the group have more rights over female mice, food, and even where to go to the toilet. In these groups, in which the strong one is naturally alpha, the weak links in a way yield to the alphas.
What the research team did was create some controlled environments that favored the weak so they could get ahead and beat the alphas.
They put an alpha mouse and an ‘ordinary mouse’ nose to nose in a tube and closed the exit and set up a mechanism where they could only exit from the direction of the alpha mouse. So for the mice to get out of the narrow tube, the alpha had to go back and give way to the ordinary mouse. Although he initially resisted, the alpha mouse began to voluntarily house the other mouse at the end of this experiment, which was done ten times over four days.
The mouse that moved to the ‘strong’ position became the new alpha, while the old alpha mouse lost all its privileges. In a short time, symptoms of depression began in the old alpha. Losing status alphas also began to ‘give up more quickly’ in different experiments conducted at the same time.
Examining the neural movements in mice to obtain the results, the researchers found that there was a great activity after loss of status in the lateral habenula region of the brain, which is also found in humans and is referred to as the ‘disappointment center’ in the brain. The rats regained their alpha while the symptoms of depression stopped with the drug treatment.
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