Although mammalian parent–offspring interactions during early life are primarily through the
mother, there is increasing evidence for the impact of fathers on offspring development. A …

This article is part of a Special Issue “Parental Care”. Paternal care, though rare among
mammals, is routinely displayed by several species of rodents. Here we review the …

Studying the causes and reproductive consequences of social variation can provide insight
into the evolutionary basis of sociality. Individuals are expected to behave adaptively to …

A challenge for social-affective neuroscience programs is to identify simple and yet valid
animal models for studying the expression of basic social emotions and their role during …

Intraspecific variation in sociality is thought to reflect a trade-off between current fitness
benefits and costs that emerge from individuals' decision to join or leave groups. Since those …

Sociality and cooperative rearing may have evolved to increase direct fitness when
conditions are challenging to reproduction and/or to reduce environmentally induced …

The cort-adaptation hypothesis indicates that an association between glucocorticoid (cort)
levels and fitness may vary with the extent to which reproduction or breeding effort is a major …

Parents in many animal species provide care to their offspring as a mechanism to enhance
their own fitness. In mammals, this behavior is expressed mostly by the females, but also by …

One major goal of integrative and comparative biology is to understand and explain the
interaction between the performance and behavior of animals in their natural environment …

While the majority of studies on the importance of parental caregiving on offspring
behavioral and brain development focus on the role of the mother, the paternal contribution …