Some humans thrive whereas others resign when exposed to threatening situations throughout life. Social support has been identified as an important modulator of these discrepancies in human behaviour, and other social animals also exhibit phenomena in which individuals recover better from aversive events when conspecifics are present – aka social buffering. Here we studied social buffering in zebrafish, by exposing focal fish to an aversive stimulus (alarm substance – AS) either in the absence or presence of conspecific cues. When exposed to AS in the presence of both olfactory (shoal water) and visual (sight of shoal) conspecific cues, focal fish exhibited a lower fear response than when tested alone, demonstrating social buffering in zebrafish. When separately testing each cue’s effectiveness, we verified that the visual cue was more effective than the olfactory in reducing freezing in a persistent threat scenario. Finally, we verified that social buffering was independent of shoal size and coincided with a distinct pattern of co-activation of brain regions known to be involved in mammalian social buffering. Thus, this study suggests a shared evolutionary origin for social buffering in vertebrates, bringing new evidence on the behavioural, sensory and neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.

Understanding how distributed neuronal circuits integrate sensory information and generate behavior is a central goal of neuroscience. Yet, studying neuronal networks at single-cell resolution across the entire adult brain has been difficult in vertebrates due to their size and opacity. We address this challenge by introducing the fish Danionella translucida as a model organism to neuroscience. This teleost remains small and transparent even in adulthood, when neural circuits and behavior have matured. Despite its small brain, Danionella displays a rich set of complex behaviors, including courtship, shoaling, schooling and acoustic communication. To enable optical activity measurements and perturbations with genetically encoded tools, we established CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing and Tol2 transgenesis techniques. These features make Danionella translucida a promising model organism for the study of adult vertebrate brain function at single-cell resolution.

In fluctuating environments, organisms require mechanisms enabling the rapid expression of context-dependent behaviors. Here, we approach behavioral flexibility from a perspective rooted in appraisal theory, aiming to provide a better understanding on how animals adjust their internal state to environmental context. Appraisal has been defined as a multi-component and interactive process between the individual and the environment, in which the individual must evaluate the significance of a stimulus to generate an adaptive response. Within this framework, we review and reframe the existing evidence for the appraisal components in animal literature, in an attempt to reveal the common ground of appraisal mechanisms between species. Furthermore, cognitive biases may occur in the appraisal of ambiguous stimuli. These biases may be interpreted either as states open to environmental modulation or as long-lasting phenotypic traits. Finally, we discuss the implications of cognitive bias for stress research.