Andrea J Nam, Masaaki Kuwajima, Patrick H Parker, Jared B Bowden, Wickliffe C Abraham, Kristen M Harris
{"title":"Perisynaptic Astroglial Response to In Vivo Long-Term Potentiation and Concurrent Long-Term Depression in the Hippocampal Dentate Gyrus.","authors":"Andrea J Nam, Masaaki Kuwajima, Patrick H Parker, Jared B Bowden, Wickliffe C Abraham, Kristen M Harris","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0943-25.2025","DOIUrl":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0943-25.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Perisynaptic astroglia provide critical molecular and structural support to regulate synaptic transmission and plasticity in the nanodomain of the axon-spine interface. Three-dimensional reconstruction from serial section electron microscopy (3DEM) was used to investigate relationships between perisynaptic astroglia and dendritic spine synapses undergoing plasticity in the adult hippocampus. Delta-burst stimulation (DBS) of the medial perforant pathway induced long-term potentiation (LTP) in the middle molecular layer and concurrent long-term depression (cLTD) in the outer molecular layer of the dentate gyrus in awake male rats. The contralateral hippocampus received baseline stimulation as a within-animal control. Brains were obtained 30 min or 2 h after DBS onset. An automated 3DEM pipeline was developed to enable unbiased quantification of astroglial coverage at the perimeter of the axon-spine interface. Under all conditions, >85% of synapses had perisynaptic astroglia processes within 120 nm of some portion of the perimeter. LTP broadened the distribution of spine sizes while reducing the presence and proximity of perisynaptic astroglia near the axon-spine interface of large spines. In contrast, cLTD transiently reduced the length of the axon-spine interface perimeter without substantially altering astroglial apposition. The postsynaptic density was discovered to be displaced from the center of the axon-spine interface, with this offset increasing during LTP and decreasing during cLTD. Astroglial access to the postsynaptic density was diminished during LTP and enhanced during cLTD, in parallel with changes in spine size. Thus, access of perisynaptic astroglia to synapses is dynamically modulated during LTP and cLTD alongside synaptic remodeling.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12462584/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144976899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Valeria C Castagna, Luis E Boero, Mariano N Di Guilmi, Camila Catalano Di Meo, Jimena A Ballestero, Paul A Fuchs, Amanda M Lauer, Ana Belén Elgoyhen, Maria Eugenia Gomez-Casati
{"title":"Strengthening Medial Olivocochlear Feedback Reduces the Developmental Impact of Early Noise Exposure.","authors":"Valeria C Castagna, Luis E Boero, Mariano N Di Guilmi, Camila Catalano Di Meo, Jimena A Ballestero, Paul A Fuchs, Amanda M Lauer, Ana Belén Elgoyhen, Maria Eugenia Gomez-Casati","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0805-25.2025","DOIUrl":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0805-25.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The early onset of peripheral deafness significantly alters the proper development of the auditory system. Likewise, exposure to loud noise during early development produces a similar disruptive effect. Before hearing onset in altricial mammals, cochlear inner hair cells (IHCs) exhibit spontaneous electrical activity that drives auditory circuit development. This activity is modulated by medial olivocochlear (MOC) efferent feedback through α9α10 nicotinic cholinergic receptors in IHCs. In adults, these receptors are restricted to outer hair cells, where they mediate MOC feedback to regulate cochlear amplification. Although the MOC system's protective role to prevent noise-induced hearing loss in adulthood is well established, its influence during early developmental stages-especially in response to exposure to loud noise-remains largely unexplored. In this study, we investigated the role of MOC feedback during early postnatal development using α9 knock-out (KO) and α9 knock-in (KI) mice of either sex, which respectively lack or exhibit enhanced cholinergic activity. Our findings reveal that both increased and absent olivocochlear activity result in altered auditory sensitivity at the onset of hearing, along with long-range alterations in the number and morphology of ribbon synapses. Early noise exposure caused lasting auditory damage in both wild-type and α9KO mice, with deficits persisting into adulthood. In contrast, α9KI mice were protected from noise-induced damage, with no long-term effects on auditory function. These results highlight the increased susceptibility of the auditory system during early postnatal development. Moreover, they indicate that an enhanced MOC feedback shields the auditory system from noise damage during this period.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12419220/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144884192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Johannes Gehrig, Cornelius Bergmann, Marie-Therese Forster, Christina Weismantel, Fan Bai, Marcus Czabanka, Andrea E Martin, Antje Meyer, Christian A Kell
{"title":"Left Perisylvian Rhythms Encode Prosody and Syntax during Delayed Sentence Repetition.","authors":"Johannes Gehrig, Cornelius Bergmann, Marie-Therese Forster, Christina Weismantel, Fan Bai, Marcus Czabanka, Andrea E Martin, Antje Meyer, Christian A Kell","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2160-24.2025","DOIUrl":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2160-24.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The human brain must add information to the acoustic speech signal in order to understand language. Many accounts propose that the prosodic structure of utterances (including their syllabic rhythm and speech melody), in combination with stored lexical knowledge, cue and interact with higher order abstract semantic and syntactic information. While cortical rhythms, particularly in the delta and theta band, synchronize to quasi-rhythmic low-level acoustic speech features, it remains unclear how the human brain encodes abstract speech properties in neural rhythms in the absence of an acoustic signal, i.e., when speakers hold planned sentences in working memory. This study disentangles the contributions of prosodic and syntactic features in cortical rhythms during delayed sentence repetition. Using high-resolution ECoG during awake tumor surgery in the left perisylvian cortex in nine patients (five female), we show that the phase of neural rhythms with frequencies ranging from 1 to 48 Hz and the broadband gamma power envelope code both low-level acoustic and abstract syntactic speech features during sentence processing and retention. Syntax and prosody coding occurred in the same frequency bands, which argues against the assumption of different frequency channels for processing and representing these speech features. Our data suggest the brain leverages the phase of various neural rhythms to code both acoustic and abstract linguistic features.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12462572/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144884189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stefanie A Tremblay, Zacharie Potvin-Jutras, Dalia Sabra, Ali Rezaei, Safa Sanami, Christine Gagnon, Brittany Intzandt, Amélie Mainville-Berthiaume, Lindsay Wright, Ilana R Leppert, Christine L Tardif, Christopher J Steele, Josep Iglesies-Grau, Anil Nigam, Louis Bherer, Claudine J Gauthier
{"title":"Multivariate White Matter Microstructure Alterations in Older Adults with Coronary Artery Disease.","authors":"Stefanie A Tremblay, Zacharie Potvin-Jutras, Dalia Sabra, Ali Rezaei, Safa Sanami, Christine Gagnon, Brittany Intzandt, Amélie Mainville-Berthiaume, Lindsay Wright, Ilana R Leppert, Christine L Tardif, Christopher J Steele, Josep Iglesies-Grau, Anil Nigam, Louis Bherer, Claudine J Gauthier","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0790-25.2025","DOIUrl":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0790-25.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) face an increased risk of cognitive impairment, dementia, and stroke. While white matter (WM) lesions are frequently reported in patients with CAD, the effects on WM microstructure alterations remain largely unknown. We aimed to identify WM microstructural alterations in individuals with CAD compared with healthy controls (HC) and to examine their relationships with cognitive performance. Forty-three (43) patients with CAD (35 males and 8 females) and 36 HC (26 males and 10 females) aged 50 and older underwent comprehensive neuropsychological testing and multimodal 3 T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A novel multivariate approach-the Mahalanobis distance (D2)-was used to quantify WM abnormalities as the amount of deviation from the HC reference group. D2 integrates multiple MRI-derived diffusion-weighted imaging, R1 relaxometry, and magnetization transfer imaging metrics, while accounting for covariance between metrics. Relationships between WM D2 and cognition (executive function and processing speed) were also assessed. Compared with HCs, patients with CAD had higher D2 values in the whole WM (<i>p</i> = 0.015) and in the right anterior and bilateral middle cerebral artery territories (<i>p</i> < 0.05). Myelin-sensitive metrics, particularly R1 relaxation rate and MT saturation, were the most important contributors to D2. Processing speed was positively associated with greater R1 in both the whole WM and left middle cerebral artery territory. These findings suggest that greater WM microstructural alterations observed in patients with CAD were mainly driven by differences in myelin content. These alterations may contribute to a heightened risk of cognitive impairment.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12462564/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144884190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Joshua Raine, Caroline Kibat, Tirtha Das Banerjee, Antónia Monteiro, Ajay S Mathuru
{"title":"<i>chrna3</i> modulates alcohol response.","authors":"Joshua Raine, Caroline Kibat, Tirtha Das Banerjee, Antónia Monteiro, Ajay S Mathuru","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0304-25.2025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0304-25.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Alcohol use disorders (AUDs) are complex phenomena governed by genetics, neurophysiology, environment, and societal structures. New methods to understand the underlying neurogenetics are valuable for designing personalised interventional strategies. Here, we used a two-choice self-administration zebrafish assay (SAZA) to isolate the function of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) subunit alpha3 (<i>chrna3</i>) in alcohol response. Juvenile zebrafish, of either sex, prior to complete sex differentiation, were examined in this study. They exhibited a biphasic response when self-administering alcohol that transitioned from attraction to aversion within minutes, suggesting they can regulate exposure to alcohol. This inverted U-shaped self-administration mirrored the effect alcohol has on shoaling behaviour. Exposure to low concentration of alcohol reduced anxiety-like behaviours, while sedative effects became prominent at higher concentrations resulting in reduced locomotion and uncoordinated swimming. In contrast, these responses are blunted in <i>chrna3</i> mutants. They exhibited prolonged alcohol self-administration, and increased gregariousness. Transcriptomic analyses suggest that glutamatergic and GABAergic neurotransmission alongside cholinergic signalling is impacted in the mutant brains. Our results thus suggest that <i>chrna3</i> dysfunction has a systemic change with an increase in alcohol tolerance being one effect. These findings also highlight the use of non-rodent alternatives to understand the neurogenetics of development of AUD.<b>Significance statement</b> This study sheds light on how a specific gene, chrna3, influences the body's response to alcohol. Using a novel self-administration zebrafish assay (SAZA), we first discovered that zebrafish acute response to alcohol is biphasic. Changes in this chrna3 function can alter sensitivity and preference to alcohol. This is important because it helps elaborate on the genetic variance among people making them more, or less susceptible to alcohol dependence. Our findings also suggest that this gene plays a role in communication pathways within the brain, potentially impacting other related conditions. Ultimately, this work offers a new avenue for building empirically tested knowledge of genetic predisposition and paves the way for future personalised treatment plans.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145139299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erratum: Barron et al., \"Ligand for Translocator Protein Reverses Pathology in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease\".","authors":"","doi":"10.1523/jneurosci.1634-25.2025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.1634-25.2025","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":"94 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.3,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145133946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Noham Wolpe, Daniel Harlev, Eyal Bergmann, Richard N Henson
{"title":"Age-Related Positivity Bias in Emotion Recognition Is Linked to Lower Cognitive Performance and Altered Amygdala-Orbitofrontal Connectivity.","authors":"Noham Wolpe, Daniel Harlev, Eyal Bergmann, Richard N Henson","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0386-25.2025","DOIUrl":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0386-25.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Changes in emotion recognition are observed in aging, in dementia, after brain lesions and as a function of mental health factors, such as depression. In aging, older adults have been argued to show a \"positivity bias,\" which has been associated with a relatively spared recognition accuracy for positive emotion and an increased tendency to label emotions as positive. This bias has been suggested to support mental well-being. However, it has also been found in association with cognitive decline and brain lesions. Here, we investigated the behavioral and brain correlates of this age-related positivity bias. We used multimodal brain imaging in a large group of human adults (<i>n</i> = 665, 333 females) drawn from a population-derived cohort across the lifespan, together with a psychometric analysis of an emotion recognition task using facial expressions. Beyond reductions in expression recognition accuracy, older adults showed increased perceptual thresholds for negative emotions and a reduced threshold for the positive emotion, even after accounting for general face recognition abilities. This positivity bias in labeling emotions was strongly associated with lower cognitive performance in older people, but not with (nonclinical) depressive symptoms. It was also associated with reduced gray matter volume in the bilateral anterior hippocampus-amygdala and increased functional connectivity between these regions and the orbitofrontal cortex. Together, age-related positivity bias is associated with cognitive decline and structural and functional brain differences. A positivity bias in emotion recognition may therefore reflect an early marker of neurodegeneration, a hypothesis that could be tested in future longitudinal studies.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12462569/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144977094","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soumil Dey, Christopher Quintanilla, Dila Bitlis, Mukesh Gautam, P Hande Ozdinler, Marco Martina
{"title":"Cell Type-Specific Alterations in Excitability and Inhibition of Upper Motor Neurons in AlsinKO Mice, a Model of Juvenile Onset ALS.","authors":"Soumil Dey, Christopher Quintanilla, Dila Bitlis, Mukesh Gautam, P Hande Ozdinler, Marco Martina","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2409-24.2025","DOIUrl":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2409-24.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) motor cortex, hyperexcitability is detected in both familial and sporadic cases, suggesting its centrality in the ALS phenotype; the underlying mechanisms, however, remain largely obscure. Here we utilize male and female UCHL1-eGFP (UeGFP) mice, in which the corticospinal neurons of the motor cortex are labeled with green fluorescent protein, to investigate the intrinsic excitability and synaptic inhibitory inputs on distinct neuron populations in WT-UeGFP and presymptomatic AlsinKO-UeGFP mice, which lack Alsin function and are a well-characterized mouse model for juvenile cases of ALS. We show that in the motor cortex of AlsinKO-UeGFP mice, eGFP-positive layer 5 pyramidal neurons, which represent upper motor neurons, show a decrease in intrinsic excitability compared with WT, whereas the electrophysiological properties of eGFP-negative cells, which identify callosal projection neurons, are unaffected. This alteration in intrinsic excitability, however, is counterbalanced by a decrease in the frequency of spontaneous inhibitory currents due to a cell-specific reduction in the number of inhibitory synaptic contacts on upper motor neurons. Thus, the overall excitability of upper motor neurons only displays negligible changes despite large alterations in intrinsic excitability and inhibitory synaptic input, which may explain why mice do not exhibit a prominent motor phenotype. The presence of this homeostatic interaction between intrinsic excitability and synaptic inhibition raises the question of which of the two changes is primary, and which is secondary, and shows that decreased function of motor cortex interneurons is an early event in ALS with Alsin mutations.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12462585/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144884187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sreenivasan Meyyappan, Mingzhou Ding, George R Mangun
{"title":"Hierarchical Organization of Human Visual Feature Attention Control.","authors":"Sreenivasan Meyyappan, Mingzhou Ding, George R Mangun","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2073-24.2025","DOIUrl":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2073-24.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Attention can be deployed in advance of visual stimuli based on features such as color or direction of motion. This anticipatory feature-based attention involves top-down neural control signals from the frontoparietal network that bias visual cortex to enhance attended information and suppress distraction. For example, anticipatory attention control can enable effective selection based on stimulus color while ignoring distracting information about stimulus motion. Anticipatory attention can also be focused more narrowly, for example, to select specific colors or motion directions that define task-relevant aspects of the stimuli. One important question that remains open is whether anticipatory attention control first biases broad feature dimensions such as color versus motion before biasing the specific feature attributes (e.g., blue vs green). To investigate this, we recorded EEG activity during a task where human participants of either sex were cued to either attend to a motion direction (up or down) or a color (blue or green) on a trial-by-trial basis. Applying multivariate decoding approaches to the EEG alpha band activity (8-12 Hz) during attention control (cue-target interval), we observed significant decoding for both the attended dimensions (motion vs color) and specific feature attributes (up vs down; blue vs green). Importantly, the temporal onset of the dimension-level biasing (motion vs color) preceded that of the attribute-level biasing (up vs down and blue vs green). These findings demonstrate that the top-down control of feature-based attention proceeds in a hierarchical fashion, first biasing the broad feature dimension, and then narrowing to the specific feature attribute.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12462576/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144884188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Birgitta Paranko, Claire Garandeau, Kerttu Seppälä, Vesa Putkinen, Severi Santavirta, Jussi Hirvonen, Christina Salmivalli, Lauri Nummenmaa
{"title":"Exposure to bullying engages social distress circuits in the adolescent and adult brain.","authors":"Birgitta Paranko, Claire Garandeau, Kerttu Seppälä, Vesa Putkinen, Severi Santavirta, Jussi Hirvonen, Christina Salmivalli, Lauri Nummenmaa","doi":"10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0738-25.2025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0738-25.2025","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite advances in understanding the psychological and social consequences of peer victimization, the immediate effects of bullying on the central nervous system remain elusive. Here we mapped the neural and attentional responses to simulated bullying in adolescents and adults and tested whether these responses are associated with real-life victimization experiences. Fifty-one adolescents (29 females, 22 males) aged 11-14 years, and 47 adults (29 females, 18 males) underwent a functional MRI (fMRI) while watching first-person videos of bullying (victimization) in the school environment, as well as neutral and positive social interactions in a similar setting. Additionally, 57 adults (36 females, 21 males) watched the same videos during an eye tracking experiment. Exposure to bullying versus positive social interaction engaged the socio-emotional and threat response systems, as well as regions related to social cognition, sensory and interoceptive processing, and motor control. These responses were consistent across adolescents and adults and were associated with the current and past victimization experiences of the participants. This large-scale activation of neural systems subserving socioemotional, somatosensory, and interoceptive processing was in line with the amplified emotional and attentional responses revealed by larger pupil size and higher fixation frequency during simulated bullying in the eye tracking experiment. Altogether these results highlight how peer victimization evokes a state of stress or alarm in the central nervous system.<b>Significance Statement</b> Victimization by bullying is associated with serious mental, somatic, and social problems, but little is known about how the brain reacts to bullying. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the brain responses to highly natural, simulated bullying and positive social interaction. We also compared these responses between adolescents and adults. Exposure to bullying activated the socioemotional distress system, as well as networks processing social and sensory information, bodily sensations, and motor actions. These responses were consistent across adolescents and adults. These findings reveal how bullying induces a state of stress or alarm in the central nervous system, highlighting the adverse and threatening nature of bullying.</p>","PeriodicalId":50114,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.0,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145126403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}