ArticlePsychopharmacology2025
Relative to females, male rats are more willing to forego obtaining sucrose reward in order to prevent harm to their cage mate.
Article in Psychopharmacology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 10 citations in OpenAlex.
- Entactogen Effects of Ketamine: A Reverse-Translational Study.The American journal of psychiatry · 2024Trial
- Editorial: Spanning the spectrum of social behavior: towards more translationally relevant animal models.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Exploring rodent prosociality: A conceptual framework.Translational neuroscience · 2025Review
- Shaping behaviors through social experience and their proposed sensitivity to stress.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
rationaleEmpathy, or the ability to perceive, share, and act upon the emotions of another, is a crucial social skill and is dysfunctional in autism and schizophrenia. While the complexities of human empathy are difficult to model in rodents, behavioral paradigms utilizing rats which study decision-making in social contexts may provide a translational framework for assessing biological, pharmacotherapeutic, and environmental interventions.
objectivesModify and expand upon the three-session rat harm aversion task, which measures the willingness of rats to cease pressing a lever that earns them sucrose reward but delivers a shock to their cage mate. We sought to test the sustainability of harm aversion across seven sessions in male and female rats.
methodsSame-sex pair-housed rats were assigned as either the observer, which had access to the lever, or the demonstrator, which would receive shocks. After training the observer to press the lever to receive sucrose pellets, the demonstrator was placed into an adjacent chamber at which point lever responses would also deliver a shock. If the observer did not press the lever, no shock and no sucrose was delivered.
resultsA sex difference in harm aversion was observed with female rats having significantly higher response rates and decreased response latencies across the seven test sessions, thus delivering more shocks and obtaining more sucrose, relative to males.
conclusionsThese data demonstrate that male rats sustain harm aversion to a greater extent relative to females.
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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.