ArticleScientific reports2020
Similar levels of emotional contagion in male and female rats.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Pupillometry and brain-wide c-Fos mapping uncover multimodal mirror emotional contagion related networks of mice.iScience · 2026Article
- Fear Synchrony of Mouse Dyads: Interaction of Sex Composition and Stress.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Relative to females, male rats are more willing to forego obtaining sucrose reward in order to prevent harm to their cage mate.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Acute and vicarious effects of social defeat stress on social behaviour in California mice,Animal behaviour · 2025Article
- Epoetin alfa has a potent anxiolytic effect on naive female rats.BMC pharmacology & toxicology · 2025Article
- Possible relations between emotional contagion and social buffering.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Painful Experiences in Social Contexts Facilitate Sensitivity to Emotional Signals of Pain from Conspecifics in Laboratory Rats.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Neuronal, affective, and sensory correlates of targeted helping behavior in male and female Sprague Dawley rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Understanding Others' Distress Through Past Experiences: The Role of Memory Engram Cells in Observational Fear.Advances in neurobiology · 2024Review
- Vicarious Emotions of Fear and Pain in Rodents.Affective science · 2023Review
- Audible pain squeaks can mediate emotional contagion across pre-exposed rats with a potential effect of auto-conditioning.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Prosocial behavior, social reward and affective state discrimination in adult male and female mice.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The role of the anterior insular during targeted helping behavior in male rats.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Emotional contagion in nonhuman animals: A review.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
- Linking Social Cognition to Learning and Memory.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Review
- Pro-social preference in an automated operant two-choice reward task under different housing conditions: Exploratory studies on pro-social decision making.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Emotional contagion, the ability to feel what other individuals feel without necessarily understanding the feeling or knowing its source, is thought to be an important element of social life. In humans, emotional contagion has been shown to be stronger in women than men. Emotional contagion has been shown to exist also in rodents, and a growing number of studies explore the neural basis of emotional contagion in male rats and mice. Here we explore whether there are sex differences in emotional contagion in rats. We use an established paradigm in which a demonstrator rat receives footshocks while freezing is measured in both the demonstrator and an observer rat. The two rats can hear, smell and see each other. By comparing pairs of male rats with pairs of female rats, we found (i) that female demonstrators froze less when submitted to footshocks, but that (ii) the emotional contagion response, i.e. the degree of influence across the rats, did not depend on the sex of the rats. This was true whether emotional contagion was quantified based on the slope of a regression linking demonstrator and observer average freezing, or on Granger causality estimates of moment-to-moment freezing. The lack of sex differences in emotional contagion is compatible with an interpretation of emotional contagion as serving selfish danger detection.
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