The complex affective and cognitive capacities of rats.

For several decades, although studies of rat physiology and behavior have abounded, research on rat emotions has been limited in scope to fear, anxiety, and pain. Converging evidence for the capacity of many species to share others' affective states has emerged, sparking interest in the empathic capacities of rats. Recent research has demonstrated that rats are a highly cooperative species and are motivated by others' distress to prosocial actions, such as opening a door or pulling a chain to release trapped conspecifics.

The effect of a prosocial environment on health and well-being during the first COVID-19 lockdown and a year later.

The outset of the COVID-19 pandemic was characterized by prolonged periods of chronic stress and social isolation. While studies have investigated the changes to well-being (WB) during this period, the impact of the social environment on long-term physical and mental health requires further study. This study aimed to assess the factors influencing WB and health outcomes, with the hypothesis that a positive social environment would play a significant immediate and long-term role in improving WB and preventing the effects of anxiety associated with the pandemic.

What's familiarity got to do with it? Neural mechanisms of observational fear in siblings and strangers.

Social modulation of pain sensitivity is considered part of the empathic response. In this issue of Neuron, Zhang at al. (2022) uncover the neurobiological basis of observational pain in mice.

Neural activation associated with outgroup helping in adolescent rats.

Prosocial behavior, helping others in need in particular, occurs preferentially in response to the perceived distress of one's own group members or ingroup. To investigate the development of ingroup bias, neural activity during a helping test was analyzed in adolescent and adult rats. Although adults selectively released trapped ingroup members, adolescent rats helped both ingroup and outgroup members, suggesting that ingroup bias emerges in adulthood.

Neural correlates of ingroup bias for prosociality in rats.

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to distress of one's own group members. In order to explore the neural mechanisms promoting mammalian helping behavior, a discovery-based approach was used here to identify brain-wide activity correlated with helping behavior in rats. Demonstrating social selectivity, rats helped others of their strain ('ingroup'), but not rats of an unfamiliar strain ('outgroup'), by releasing them from a restrainer.

Anxiolytic Treatment Impairs Helping Behavior in Rats.

Despite decades of research with humans, the biological mechanisms that motivate an individual to help others remain poorly understood. In order to investigate the roots of pro-sociality in mammals, we established the helping behavior test, a paradigm in which rats are faced with a conspecific trapped in a restrainer that can only be opened from the outside. Over the course of repeated test sessions, rats exposed to a trapped cagemate learn to open the door to the restrainer, thereby helping the trapped rat to escape (Ben-Ami Bartal et al.

Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species.

Empathy reflects the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, coupled with a motivation to care for their well-being. It has evolved in the context of parental care for offspring, as well as within kinship bonds, to help facilitate group living. In this paper, we integrate the perspectives of evolution, animal behaviour, developmental psychology, and social and clinical neuroscience to elucidate our understanding of the proximate mechanisms underlying empathy.

Pro-social behavior in rats is modulated by social experience.

In mammals, helping is preferentially provided to members of one's own group. Yet, it remains unclear how social experience shapes pro-social motivation. We found that rats helped trapped strangers by releasing them from a restrainer, just as they did cagemates.

Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats.

Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate.

"Feeling" the pain of those who are different from us: Modulation of EEG in the mu/alpha range.

We explored how apparently painful stimuli and the ability to identify with the person on whom the pain is inflicted modulate EEG suppression in the mu/alpha range (8-12 Hz). In a 2 × 2 design, we presented pictures of hands either experiencing needle pricks or being touched by a Q-tip. In the dissimilar-other condition, the hand was assigned to a patient suffering from a neurological disease in which Q-tips inflicted pain, whereas needle pricks did not.