A double-hit of social and economic stress in mice precipitates changes in decision-making strategies

BACKGROUND:Economic stress can serve as a "second-hit" for those who already accumulated a history of adverse life experiences. How one recovers from a setback is a core feature of resilience but is seldom captured in animal studies. METHODS:We challenged mice in a novel two-hit stress model by first exposing animals to chronic social defeat stress and then testing adaptations to increasing reward-scarcity on a neuroeconomic task. Mice were tested across months on the Restaurant Row task during which mice foraged daily for their primary source of food while on a limited time-budget in a closed-economy system. An abrupt transition into a reward-scarce environment elicits an economic challenge, precipitating a drop in food intake and bodyweight to which mice must respond to survive. RESULTS:We found that mice with a history of social stress mounted a robust behavioral response to this economic challenge, achieved through a complex redistribution of time allocation among competing opportunities. Interestingly, we found that mice with a history of social defeat displayed changes in the development of decision-making policies during the recovery process important for not only ensuring food security necessary for survival but also prioritizing subjective value and that these changes emerged in only certain types of choices. CONCLUSIONS:These findings indicate that an individual's capacity to recover from economic challenges depends on one's prior history of stress and can affect multiple decision-making aspects of subjective well-being, highlighting a motivational balance that may be altered in stress-related disorders such as depression.