Prosocial behavior in rats.docx

Sarah Daum Extra Credit Talk PSY 130 Title: Behavioral and emotional stimuli effects on prosocial behavior in rats Speaker: Sarah Winokur This study sought to find out whether or not rats experience empathy in the same way humans do. Understanding this behavior is important because if results show that rats do experience empathy, there would be opportunities to research possible treatments for social disorders like Autism. Sarah modeled empathy by placing two rats in a cage, one trapped in a harmless mouse trap and the other one free. She wanted to see if the free rat would try to rescue the caged rat. However, one flaw she noted in her presentation was that the study did not distinguish between the rat feeling empathy versus merely looking for company. Sarah used 16 male and 16 female rats, and to determine which of these rats would show anxiety she conducted a light-dark box test. The hypothesis was that mid-level anxiety rats would react most to the closed-door experiment, so she used these. For the procedure, the focal rat was conditioned to press a lever for a sucrose pellet reward; ad more bar presses was predicted to correlate with more rescues. The research is still going on, so they have not produced results yet. In future testing Sarah hopes to use ear plugs to eliminate the influence of vocalizations made by the trapped rat.

I found this study interesting, because it’s not something I would normally consider: do animals have empathy or not? I’m interested to hear about Sarah’s results when she is finished with her test.