Empathy

Rodents can transfer pain or fear and develop empathy by emotional contagion. Empathy may affect behavior impacting the results of behavioral tests. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of empathy behavior on the results of the passive avoidance test in rats housed in different conditions. Passive avoidance test was performed on male adult Sprague-Dawley rats divided into three groups with different housing conditions to investigate the contribution of emotional contagion of empathy by odor and auditory senses. They were housed in the same room and in the same cage (group 1, n=10

Empathy is vital in interpersonal and societal interactions and serves as an emotional bridge fostering pro-social, including helping behavior. The process of offering help unfolds through distinct stages, starting with empathetic responses to another individual's negative emotional state, progressing to the decision to provide assistance, and culminating in the social rewards that follow such acts. Despite years of research in humans, the neural networks recruited in different stages of prosocial behavior still remain elusive. In this study, we established single photon emission computerized

This study investigates the neural dynamics of hand gesture recognition and execution in the context of social interaction. Our scalable experimental design (SED) considered from controlled laboratory environments to real-world settings, using the rock-paper-scissors (RPS) game. Electroencephalography (EEG) µ rhythm suppression in 23 participants (16 females, aged 18-50 years) was quantified on C3, Cz, and C4 sensors across four experiments: Gesture Identification (experiment 1: Baseline), Simulated Interaction A (experiment 2: versus Artificial Intelligence), Simulated Interaction B (experime

Friendships positively support healthy socioemotional and cognitive development. Research indicates that friendships often form between people with similar demographic and behavioral characteristics. Understanding and sharing thoughts, feelings and perceptions are essential to a friendship. Such processes are linked to brain activity and structures of the corticolimbic network (CLN), which is associated with perspective-taking, emotion processing and regulation. This study aims to investigate neural and behavioral similarities between friend dyads. T1-neuroimaging, neurophysiological and behav

…sharing (AS), an important aspect of empathy, in observational fear learning. N=37 students completed an observational Pavlovian fear conditioning paradigm, in which they learned to fear a cue (assessed in a subsequent test stage) by watching videos of a demonstrator receiving shocks with that cue (learning stage). Participants watched the videos in a state of high or low AS, respectively, induced by hypnotic suggestions, using a within-subjects design. Unconditioned responses (UR) to the demonstrator’s pain during learning and condit

…between social anxiety (SA) and empathy. Based on EEG ERP technique, we examined how socially anxious individuals process empathy for pain in relation to perspective taken. Methods. The ERP procedure involved images depicting hands in painful and neutral situations, after which participants evaluated the degree of perceived painfulness and unpleasantness of the stimuli. The study was divided into blocks, each preceding with the instruction to take first-person perspective (FPP) or third-person perspectives (TPP). Participants (N=65

…used for investigating mechanisms of empathy. Highlights • A protocol for the rapid social transfer of pain in rodents • Detailed requirements for handling and housin

Empathy is supposed to play a functional role in prosocial behavior. However, there has been behavioral evidence that people do not empathize everyone equally. I’ll present studies that show brain imaging evidence for racial ingroup bias in empathy for pain. These studies reveal multiple-level neural mechanisms underlying racial ingroup bias in empathy. I’ll also discuss potential intervention of racial ingroup bias in empathy and its social implications.

Empathy plays a critical role in social interactions, and many species, including rodents, display evolutionarily conserved behavioral antecedents of empathy. In both humans and rodents, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) encodes information about the affective state of others. However, little is known about which downstream targets of the ACC contribute to empathy behaviors. We optimized a protocol for the social transfer of pain behavior in mice and compared the ACC-dependent neural circuitry responsible for this behavior with the neural circuitry required for the social transfer of two rel