Future studies could investigate whether attenuating the WMI’s depression-like behavior before gestation, by antidepressant treatment (Will et al., 2003) or by environmental enrichment (Mehta-Raghavan et al., 2016), would equalize litter survival, maternal and self-directed behaviors, and neuropeptide receptor expression in the hypothalamus of WMI and WLI dams. Here, NPSR1 is linked to major depressive disorder.