Most of us will have experienced the contagious nature of someone else’s stress.
Throw in an emotional element, such as a spouse or child, and more often than not this stress will be amplified.
If they’re worried that they’re going to be late or they have job concerns, the chances are that you will also experience a degree of stress.
However, what are the physical ramifications?
Scientists from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, set to find out by experimenting on mice. Their findings were published in the journal, Nature Neuroscience.
How stress triggers changes in brain
The researchers paired male and female mice.
They removed one of the mice and then exposed it to mild stress. They returned the mouse to their partner and examined the effect it had.
They found that the neurons in the mouse that had been exposed to stress changed in the rodent’s hippocampus region of the brain.
The also discovered that the mouse which hadn’t been exposed to stress experienced the same alteration to their brain.
The activation of these neurons in the mice also caused the animals to release a chemical, which they referred to as the alarm pheromone.
They speculated that this chemical might be the trigger for the increased anxiety in the partner.
The study’s senior author, Jaideep Bains, said that their findings challenged perceptions that humans’ consciousness differs radically from animals’.
“The study also demonstrates that traits we think of as uniquely human are evolutionary conserved biological traits,” he added.
