Trends in Individual and Social Behaviors

This Research Topic is part of the annual Trends in Individual and Social Behaviors series, which highlights new research on the psychobiological mechanisms underlying individual differences, social interaction, and group dynamics, and their implications for psychiatric, neurological, and neurodevelopmental disorders. It brings together work on how neural circuits, genes, their epigenetic control, neurotransmitters, and hormones interact with physiological states, developmental stage and the social environment. Ultimate goal is to tackle how animals explore, learn, self-regulate, and interact, across species from invertebrates and fish to rodents, non-human primates, and humans. The field continues to evolve through the application of modern approaches to the study of behavior. Technical advances including deep-learning pose estimation and computational ethology, transcriptomics, circuit-level tools, and ethologically valid, animal-friendly paradigms have enabled finer dissection of social behavior and revealed how individual variability arises through complex, context-dependent interactions between brain, body, and environment. Comparative studies across diverse taxa continue to inform and deepen our understanding of general principles of individual and social behavior.We welcome all article types, particularly Original Research, Review, Mini Review, Opinion and Perspective articles, that:a) report novel findings on the mechanisms of individual differences and social behavior;b) address open questions in how behavior is generated, regulated, and disrupted;c) connect mechanisms across levels of analysis, across species, or across sexes. Contributions may address both foundational and rapidly developing areas, including but not limited to:• Neural circuits of prosocial behavior, empathy, and emotional contagion.Circuit- and cell-type-level control of prosocial and helping behavior; the contagion of pain and fear and the social modulation of affect; and individual variability in empathic responding, including its reduction in low-empathy and callous-unemotional phenotypes and relevance to the autism spectrum.• Aggression, dominance, and social bonding.Neural control of aggression and related killing behaviors, from maternal and inter-male aggression to predation and infanticide; social recognition, dominance hierarchies, social networks, and collective behavior; and the circuit and experiential mechanisms of affiliation, pair bonding, and parental care.• Individual differences, temperament, and self-regulation.Sources of behavioral individuality - temperament, personality, coping styles, impulsivity, and behavioral flexibility - and their genetic, strain-related, and neural underpinnings, including dopamine signaling; and how these traits shape resilience, vulnerability, and adaptive versus maladaptive outcomes.• Developmental programming of behavior across lifespan.How social play, environmental enrichment, prenatal, perinatal and postnatal adversities, including early-life seizures, shape behavioral trajectories; gene–environment interactions and epigenetic contributions to behavioral variation, including open questions on transgenerational effects; and sex differences across life stages.• Physiological state and environmental modulation of behavior.How internal physiological state and the external environment tune individual and social behavior, including interoceptive and neuroimmune signalling, circadian factors, and the emerging role of the gut–brain axis; and the effects of environmental exposures and psychoactive compounds on behavior.• Innovative and integrative directions.Ethologically valid, animal-friendly, and naturalistic approaches to studying behavior; and work that integrates mechanisms across levels of analysis, species, and sexes, connecting findings from animal models to individual and social behavior in humans.Together, these contributions aim to represent the current direction of individual and social behavior research and the questions shaping its next stage. Topic editors: Walter Adriani, Roberta Monterazzo Cysneiros, Raffaele d'Isa Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86332/trends-in-individual-and-social-behaviors