The socially enriched environment test: a new approach to evaluate social behavior in a mouse model of social anxiety disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common anxiety disorder characterized by a marked fear of social situations. Treatments for SAD, including exposure therapy and medication, are not satisfactory for all patients. This has led to the development of several paradigms to study social fear in rodents. However, there are still some social impairments observed in SAD patients that have never been examined in rodent models. Indeed, social situations avoided by SAD patients include not only social interactions but also public performances and being observed by others. Nevertheless, tests used to assess sociability in rodents evaluate mostly social interaction in pairs. Thus, we developed a new test—a socially enriched environment test—that evaluates sociability within a group of three unfamiliar conspecifics in an enriched environment. In this study, we induced a SAD-like behavior (i.e., social fear) in male mice using social fear conditioning (SFC) and then tested social fear using the socially enriched environment test and the three-chamber test. Finally, we tested the effects of fear extinction and acute diazepam treatment in reversing social fear. Results revealed, in conditioned mice, decreased object exploration in proximity to conspecifics, social interaction, and mouse-like object exploration. Extinction training, but not acute diazepam treatment, reversed SFC-induced behavioral changes. These findings demonstrate that the socially enriched environment test provides an appropriate behavioral approach to better understand the etiology of SAD. This test may also have important implications in the exploration of new treatments.