Many animals participate in social interactions, where information from such encounters dynamically affects gene expression in the brain, which in turn optimizes animal behavior. Isolation from the social interactions which normally inform these mechanisms induces a range of aberrant transcriptomic and behavioral phenotypes both in vertebrates and invertebrates, though it is unclear if these similar phenotypes arise from conserved (ancestral) or convergent (non-ancestral) evolutionary histories. My work seeks to analyze RNA-seq data across two species of vertebrate and two species of invertebrate to better inform the nature of the neurobiology of these organisms. Developments in this area of science may lead to more advanced therapeutics in humans.