Prairie voles may unlock mystery of escaping spiral of emotional loss
The inability of some people to pull out of a spiral of grieving after suffering an emotional loss is at the heart of a new study being launched at the University of Colorado.
And it’s hoped that a colony of 100 prairie voles will play an important role in unlocking the mystery.
Zoe Donaldson, an assistant professor of behavioral neuroscience at CU, will be using a $1.5 million Highrisk, HighReward grant announced Tuesday by the National Institute of Health to see why for the approximately 10 percent of people who experience what is known as “complicated grief” — deep mourning that can continue for years.
She said the idea for this avenue of study actually did not originate with her.
“I have a colleague who is a psychiatrist, and she specializes in people who are having difficulty moving on,” Donaldson said. “She actually called me and said, would it even be possible to study something like this in an animal?”
Donaldson thought it might be, and had the animal in mind; prairie voles, she said, are among the very few mammals — 3 percent to 7 percent, she said — that form monogamous relationships and are well suited for studying in a laboratory setting.
The Donaldson colleague who sparked this probe is Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who has found that current antidepressant medications often don’t help people who struggle to get over the loss of someone they loved.
“Close attachments contribute importantly to many of the psychological problems individuals face, yet there is very little neurobiological research informing this question of what happens in the brain when we lose someone,” Shear said in a news release.
Maybe the voles will lead Donaldson to an answer.
“The longer term goal is to identify factors that make it easier or harder for them to move on. It may be that normal voles don’t have any trouble moving on — that there isn’t a subset that struggles to adapt to the loss of their partner. But if they have the systems to move on, then we can ask how manipulating their brains affects their ability to do so. In other words, we can recreate a very human scenario of not being able to move on within this animal, and ask what happens.”