Rats Feel Each Other's Pain

sciencehabit writes "Empathy lets us feel another person's pain and drives us to help ease it. But is empathy a uniquely human trait? For decades researchers have debated whether nonhuman animals possess this attribute. Now a new study shows that rats will free a trapped cagemate in distress. The results mean that these rodents can be used to help determine the genetic and physiological underpinnings of empathy in people."

Comments

Re:"Empathy Tests"

[Trepidity]

There've been some milder studies vaguely like that in monkeys. In one such study, a monkey is given a cord that, if pulled, gives it some food. In the control group, that's all; in the experimental group, pulling the cord also shocks another monkey. They are much less willing to pull the "also shocks someone else" cord. That can be interpreted as a form of empathetic altruism, foregoing a reward to avoid harming someone else. A counter-argument is that it's not altruism so much as monkeys finding expressions of distress unpleasant, meaning they avoid pulling a cord that results in unpleasant sounds: a selfish behavior, because the real goal is to avoid hearing sounds they don't like. On the third hand, that counter-argument is hard to actually separate from "real" empathy, because one potential mechanism for (some kinds of) empathy is that we find it unpleasant to hear expressions of distress from others who are similar enough to us.