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. 2023 Jan 12;28(3):993–1003. doi: 10.1038/s41380-022-01913-z

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 2 — Translational research of mental disorders using animal models fail to fulfill the expectation to discover novel treatments. Mental illnesses in humans (e.g., anxiety disorders) are complex and influenced by genetic predispositions, past and present environments and the interactions between them. The diagnosis of illness is based on categorized behavioral criterions (‘+’ symbols). On the other hand, anxiety in mice is modeled using short tests that detect ‘anxiety-like’ phenotypes. Though highly controlled, this behavioristic approach is not enough to translate to the complexity of human mental illnesses. Automatic monitoring of complex behavior in groups of mice (semi-natural setup) can reveal individual coping strategies. Combining anxiety-like tests and semi-natural setups while researching endophenotypes that are common across mammalian species have the potential to bridge the gap.