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Pregnant women face many physical and psychological changes during their pregnancy. It is known that stress, caused by many factors and life events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can negatively impact the health of mothers and offspring. It is the first time social media, such as Twitter, are available and commonly used during a global pandemic; this allows access to a rich set of data. The objective of this study was to characterize the content of an international sample of tweets related to pregnancy and mental health during the first wave of COVID-19, from March to June 2020. Tweets were collected using GetOldTweets3. Sentiment analysis was performed using the VADER sentiment analysis tool, and a thematic analysis was performed. In total, 192 tweets were analyzed: 51 were from individuals, 37 from companies, 56 from non-profit organizations, and 48 from health professionals/researchers. Findings showed discrepancies between individual and non-individual tweets. Women expressed anxiety, depressive symptoms, sleeping problems, and distress related to isolation. Alarmingly, there was a discrepancy between distress expressed by women with isolation and sleep difficulties compared to support offered by non-individuals. Concrete efforts should be made to acknowledge these issues on Twitter while maintaining the current support offered.

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The adolescence period is marked by intense social play behavior in rats, shown to influence social, cognitive, and emotional processes. The goal of this study was to assess the ability of adolescent rats to display prosocial behaviors through a sharing task and to learn prosociality from vicarious observation. The paradigm involved a pretraining phase, using a two-chamber operant box with two reward differentiated levers on the actor side, providing one and two sucrose pellets respectively upon pressing. Dyads where actors were not exposed to pretraining session acted as controls. The prosocial phase ensued, where an easy lever pressed dispensed one pellet while a hard lever pressed dispensed one reward to both the actor and observer in the adjacent chamber. Actor and observer rats then switched roles enabling vicarious learning assessment. Findings revealed pretraining to be critical for behavior and task contingency in adolescent rats. Complex behavioral sequences marked by increased visual communication between dyads was observed. Despite the diversity of behaviors, observer rats failed to learn prosocial behaviors. This study shows pretraining to act as a key element promoting behavioral interactions; the thorough behavioral analysis performed highlights the ability for adolescent rats to display a richness of behaviors when paired with a congener. Another interesting finding was the ability for rats to learn prosocial behaviors, but the inability to learn such behaviors by observation. These findings call for further studies to understand prosocial behaviors in rodents and their ability to learn such behaviors from a congener.