This article reviews the neural mechanisms underlying social status identified in animal studies with rodents and primates, and assesses how social rank affects animal\'s social behaviors and emotion which may be relevant to modern type depression.
Several brain regions such as medial prefrontal cortex are implicated in the formation of animal\'s social status, which leads to the differences in vulnerability and resilience to social stress.
On the basis of these findings, we propose that physical interventions such as voluntary exercise, diet, transcranial direct current stimulation, and psychotherapy, rather than psychotropic drugs, may be useful therapeutic approaches for modern type depression, which is a typical example of social status conflict and a phenotype of adjustment disorder to the traditional hierarchical social order.