ABSTRACT
In this review, we describe how research is conducted on the development of the social brain in adolescence in rodents. We first describe the typical social behaviour of adolescent rodents and how social behaviour is measured, and we provide an overview of the development of the rodent social brain. We then review evidence from our lab of how social stress exposures in adolescence influence social development. This research highlights the unique plasticity of the adolescent period; adolescents are more sensitive to the lasting consequences of exposures to social instability stress than are adults, and atypical social behaviour is evident in adolescent socially stressed rats long after the stress exposures in adulthood. Although the extent to which adolescent social stress in rats can be used to model complex social function in humans is a matter of debate, the general principles of adolescent social development that emerge from investigations in rats facilitate the generation of testable hypotheses of adolescent social development and how stressors perturb such development in humans.
