We once had a line of mice that attacked females instead of mating with them. The poor females seemed pretty traumatized by that. Here's a paper doing the same thing.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v509/n7502/full/nature13169.html

Female mice are notorious group cohabitants and isolation from the group would induce untold stress...although why anyone would want to traumatize a mouse (or any creature) is beyond me...there are enough damaged humans to examine

Hi Brooke,

There are far better paradigms than social defeat to induce stress. As Caroline mentioned, social isolation is a good stressors and has been shown to induce changes in neurogenesis and increase stress and anxiety-related behaviors in open field and plus maze. Additionally, many labs use chronic variable or variate stress paradigms which consist of multiple stressors repeated over the course of 7-14 days. I recommend you do a quick search for papers using these types of paradigms. Additionally, here's one from our lab

Article Chronic stress increases pituitary adenylate cyclase-activat...

Thanks for the advice everyone!