ArticleiScience2022
Helping behavior in prairie voles: A model of empathy and the importance of oxytocin.
Article in iScience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effects of Classical Music on Behavioral and Physiological Stress Markers in Socially Isolated Prairie Voles.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of adversity-overcoming pup rescue behavior in female mice.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The entactogen MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, "Ecstasy") disrupts helping behaviour while reinforcing electrophysiological indicators of potentially associated synaptic plasticity in male Sprague-Dawley rats.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2026Article
- Oxytocin and vasopressin enhance social pain empathy via common and distinct of neural expressions, genetic pathways, and networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Prosocial Helping Behavior: Conceptual Issues and Neural Mechanisms.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Rescue-like behavior in a bystander mouse toward anesthetized conspecifics promotes arousal via a tongue-brain connection.Science advances · 2025Article
- Third-party punishment-like behavior in a rat model.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Oxytocin-induced birth causes sex-specific behavioral and brain connectivity changes in developing rat offspring.iScience · 2024Article
- The role of the oxytocin system in the resilience of patients with breast cancer.Frontiers in oncology · 2023Review
- Why help others? Insights from rodent to human early childhood research.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Oxytocin receptors are widely distributed in the prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) brain: Relation to social behavior, genetic polymorphisms, and the dopamine system.The Journal of comparative neurology · 2022Article
- Oxytocin, Vasopressin, and Social Behavior: From Neural Circuits to Clinical Opportunities.Endocrinology · 2022Review
- Dissecting social decision-making: A spotlight on oxytocinergic transmission.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2022Review
- Body language signals for rodent social communication.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Several studies suggest that rodents show empathic responses and helping behavior toward others. We examined whether prairie voles would help conspecifics who were soaked in water by opening a door to a safe area. Door-opening latency decreased as task sessions progressed. Female and male voles stayed close to the soaked voles' side at equal rates and opened the door with similar latencies. When the conspecific was not soaked in water, the door-opening latency did not decrease. This suggests that the distress of the conspecific is necessary for learning to open the door and that the door-opening performed by prairie voles corresponds to helping behavior. Additionally, we examined the helping behavior in prairie voles in which oxytocin receptors were genetically knocked out. Oxytocin receptor knockout voles demonstrated less learning of the door-opening behavior and less interest in soaked conspecifics. This suggests that oxytocin is important for the emergence of helping behavior.
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Registered trials
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