Science

Empathy as a "Danger Antenna”

Rats are social animals, exquisitely attuned to the emotions of the rats around them. In a new study published in PLoS Biology, researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience show that rats may use this sense of empathy as a way to gauge danger.

Most studies of empathy conceive of it as a one-way phenomenon in which an observer “catches” the emotions of another. But in real life, it’s more of an interactive process in which information flows in two directions.

“Emotions develop in a social loop,” says neuroscientist Christian Keysers, lead author of the new study. For instance, when a child falls down, the parent reacts—either calmly or in a panic. The child looks to the parent and, based on his or her reaction, she might stand up and brush herself off or start sobbing.

Keysers and his colleagues scrutinized this social loop scientifically for the first time, using a paradigm that allowed them to capture social influences in two directions. They put two rats face to face and then startled one of them (the "demonstrator") with a brief electric shock to the feet. Then they observed the reactions of both rats. They found that the observer appears to “catch” the fear of the demonstrator, but the flow of information goes both ways: the reaction of the observer also influences how the shocked rat responds. Observers that were less scared reduced fear in the demonstrators.