Although there is substantial evidence of other animals displaying the most basic of empathetic abilities, ie. emotional contagion and mimicry (ie. Miller et al., 1959; Wechkin et al., 1964; Langford et al., 2006), studies exploring more sophisticated abilities, ie. targeted helping and consolation, have mostly focused on primates, cetaceans, and elephants (all reviewed in: Pérez-Manrique & Gomila, 2018). Within the last decade, evidence for more advanced empathy has also been found in smaller-brained animals like rats (Ben-Ami Bartal, 2011, 2014, 2016; Sato et al, 2015) but such studies have been met with criticisms and alternative explanations (Jentsch & Ringbach, 2011; Silberberg et al., 2014; Schwartz et al., 2017; Perez-Manrique & Gomila, 2018).

 

While empathy can stimulate prosocial behavior, it can also elicit personal distress which could motivate self-directed behavior to alleviate one’s own distress to an observed situation (Batson et al., 1987). This aspect of prosocial behavior has not been a focus in previous studies, but offers an interesting avenue by which to explore motivations behind helping behavior. One of my experiments explored the empathetic response behavior in rats when presented with a distressed cage-mate when an option to escape is presented to determine if helping behavior in rats is the result of an attempt to alleviate another’s distress or ameliorate personal stress.

 

Upon completion of the aforementioned study, we wanted to add to the body of literature that has previously demonstrated that rats will help a distressed individual across various contexts by examining helping behavior in rats when a cost was present to determine if the presence of a cost hinders the occurence of helping behavior.

 

Through both of these studies, all trials were video and audio recorded. The video recordings help us better understand activity levels and movements associated with helping behavior while the audio recordings are analyzed for both distress and anticipation of reward US calls to discern the role of communication in helping behavior.