Graph Theoretical Analysis of c-Fos Activity

All data values are presented as the mean ± SEM. Mann–Whitney U test was used to analyze statistical differences using GraphPad Prism 7 software. Statistical significance was set at ^∗p < 0.05, ^∗∗p < 0.01, ^∗∗∗p < 0.001, ^∗∗∗∗p < 0.0001. Functional network analyses of the c-Fos dataset were computed with the Rubinov and Sporns (2010) Brain Connectivity Toolbox¹ in MATLAB R2016 (The Mathworks Inc.) Graph theoretical analysis of c-Fos data between gentle handling and non-handling conditions was used to calculate the relationship among the 16 ROIs. Correlations among the 16 ROIs arranged by rank-order were conducted using Kendall’s Tau correlation coefficient. Community correlation network and participation coefficients were analyzed according to previous studies, and a threshold value of 0.35 was set (Newman, 2006 (link); Power et al., 2013 (link); Vetere et al., 2017 (link); Rogers-Carter et al., 2018 (link)).