About This Project

Interest into the evolution of empathy in non-humans has recently sparked a series of experiments exploring helping behavior in animals, including rats. My Ph.D. dissertation research is designed to further our understanding of this ability.

Previously, rats have been found to display empathy by opening the door of a restrainer housing a distressed cage-mate: the study proposed here will investigate whether less empathy is displayed when it is costly to help others.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Empathy is the ability to share, be affected by, & understand the emotions of others & consists of various emotional responses ranging from simple emotional contagion, where one matches the emotions of another, to more complex, empathetic perspective-taking, where an individual puts themselves in the place of another, understanding where they are coming from.

To better understand the evolution of these complex forms of empathy, researchers, including me, have been investigating empathetic abilities in rats & found that they will open the door of a restrainer to release a distressed cage-mate, & will do so in other contexts as well (my own work included (unpublished)); but, further research is needed to understand the limitations & underlying motivations of such prosocial behavior.

What is the significance of this project?

At the most general level, the work outlined here will:

1. Allow us to better understand the evolution of empathy

2. Provide insight into the contexts that elicit an empathetic response

3. Set the stage for future work focused on the neural circuitry necessary to perform cognitively complex social behaviors

4. Set the stage for translational studies in which work from animal behavior is used to reduce human antisocial behavior

5. Help us better understand disorders marked by a lack of empathy, like Autism Spectrum Disorder & Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Empathy in nonhumans allows us to manipulate & test levels of neurotransmitters & hormones, as well as investigate brain activity in regions that facilitate empathetic behavior, in ways that may be unethical or impractical in human studies

What are the goals of the project?

The experiments detailed here aim to further our understanding of empathetic capabilities in other animals by determining if witnessing a distressed cage-mate will illicit empathetic perspective-taking and facilitate helping behavior when some risk is involved.

Specifically, we aim to determine if the empathetic response of rats is tempered when it is costly to employ. If rats continue to open the restrainer door to release their trapped cage-mate even when a cost is associated, it suggests that the motivation to alleviate the distress of a trapped cage-mate is a powerful one. Future studies could examine the neural and hormonal components of empathy, as well as set the stage for comparative work on the costs and benefits of empathy in many different animals.