“A bromance can be a good thing,” said lead author Elizabeth Kirby, who started work on the study while a doctoral student at UC Berkeley and continued it after assuming a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford. “Males are getting a bad rap when you look at animal models of social interactions, because they are assumed to be instinctively aggressive. But even rats can have a good cuddle – essentially a male-male bromance – to help recover from a bad day.”
The new study written by: Sandra E Muroy, Kimberly LP Long, Daniela Kaufer and Elizabeth D Kirby, available online, will be published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.