Mechanisms Underlying Sociality (MUS) Lab

The Mechanisms Underlying Sociality (MUS) Lab at The University of New Orleans focuses on understanding how bodily mechanisms influence social cognition and behavior. One of the primary questions of interest is how deficits in metabolism and/or temperature regulation may relate to differences in social cognitive abilities in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). This question is motivated by reports of issues with temperature regulation  in ASDs and related disorders (e.g., schizophrenia), including the “fever effect,” in which some children with ASD show surprising recovery of functioning during high fevers (see Curran et al., 2007; Grzadzinski et al., 2018).

We employ rodent models–e.g., mice with either genetically engineered or spontaneously expressed social and/or thermoregulatory deficits–to explore this question. Oxytocin ‘knockout’ mice, for example, show differences in both social and thermoregulatory functioning and thus provide an important model of how these seemingly unrelated systems might have causal inter-connections. Recent studies in the MusLab have also explored the neurobehavioral effects of early-life exposure to the common antipyretic acetaminophen (paracetamol). Although a mouse or a rat can never be entirely equivalent to a human, research on rodents can be invaluable in providing mechanistic insight into causal processes operating in humans. In the case of acetaminophen (APAP), for example, exposure to the drug is so common and ubiquitous, and so confounded by numerous other variables (e.g., the clinical reason or indication for taking the drug) that animal studies are the only way forward to disentangle potential influences of APAP on development.