ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2020
Rats display empathic behavior independent of the opportunity for social interaction.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers.
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Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Individual Variability in Rat Helping Behavior: A Role for Social Affiliation and Oxytocin Receptors.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Tending the sick: Observations of epimeletic behavior in humpback whales towards conspecifics during entanglement events.PloS one · 2025Article
- Exploring rodent prosociality: A conceptual framework.Translational neuroscience · 2025Review
- Norway rats recruit cooperation partners based on previous receipt of help while disregarding kinship.iScience · 2024Article
- Shaping behaviors through social experience and their proposed sensitivity to stress.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Review
- Do They Know What They Are Doing? Cognitive Aspects of Rescue Behaviour Directed by Workers of the Red Wood AntLife (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Neuronal, affective, and sensory correlates of targeted helping behavior in male and female Sprague Dawley rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Editorial: Animal-friendly methods for rodent behavioral testing in neuroscience research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- In search of prosociality in rodents: A scoping review.PloS one · 2024Article
- Negative energy balance hinders prosocial helping behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Article
- Making a case for the free exploratory paradigm: animal welfare-friendly assays that enhance heterozygosity and ecological validity.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- The intersection of empathy and addiction.Pharmacology, biochemistry, and behavior · 2023Review
- Tickle contagion in the rat somatosensory cortex.iScience · 2022Article
- Helping behavior in prairie voles: A model of empathy and the importance of oxytocin.iScience · 2022Article
- The role of the anterior insular during targeted helping behavior in male rats.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Social behavior in prepubertal neurexin 1α deficient rats: A model of neurodevelopmental disorders.Behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Empathy, the capacity for shared emotional valence with others, can allow for cooperativity and social bonding between individuals. However, clinical studies indicate it is dysregulated in neuropsychiatric disorders like autism and addiction, making a translationally relevant model of empathy extremely important. The evolutionary basis of the empathic behaviors observed across numerous species can be described using the Perception Action Model (PAM), in which shared affect can promote an action that eliminates the distress of both the "Target" and, by extension, the "Observer". Increasing evidence suggests rodents will work to reduce the distress of a conspecific, but current models of helping behavior are unable to completely parse apart whether the reported behavior is driven by empathy or social reward. The current study demonstrates, using a novel behavioral model, rats learn to aid a distressed conspecific in the absence of social reward, retain the task over time, and previous experience increases the rate of task acquisition. Further, our model suggests that empathic behavior is subject to low effort as compared to a social reward. We next validated the specificity of this model to study empathic processes, characterized the importance of both the Target's level of distress and the impact of the Observer's familiarity with the Target on empathic behavior. Overall, we believe this model adheres to the PAM of empathy by eliminating the influence of social interaction. Importantly, it can be used to directly evaluate the neurocircuitry of empathy and explore the interplay between blunted empathic behavior and neuropsychiatric disorders.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.