Taking action: empathy and social interaction in rats.
Taking action: empathy and social interaction in rats.
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采取行动：老鼠的同理心和社交互动。
DOI：
10.1038/s41386-019-0596-0
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发表时间：
2020
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Golden,SamA
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Venniro,Marco;Golden,SamA
想象一下，你正走在路上，注意到一个人在人行道上哭，看起来很痛苦。这个人对你来说并不熟悉，也没有请求任何帮助，所以你在接近他时犹豫是可以理解的。在犹豫不决的那一刻，你可能会问自己一个可能的问题：如果你发现自己处于类似的情况，你是否希望陌生人提供支持。你最终会停下来提供情感上的支持吗？理解别人而不是你自己的能力被定义为同理心。移情是一种复杂的行为，它通过人际社会化和帮助来促进社会关系的形成。缺乏同理心可能会导致几种神经精神疾病的精神病理，包括自闭症谱系障碍和物质使用障碍。因此，了解移情行为的心理过程和神经生物学基础是至关重要的。移情需要对情绪和知觉之间的相互作用有细微差别的理解，在临床前实验室环境中建立模型一直是具有挑战性的--甚至是有争议的。1950-20世纪60年代的早期研究证实，老鼠在目睹同种动物处于困境时会表现出情绪反应[1，2]。最近的工作扩展了这些观察，表明老鼠会从束缚或充满水的隔间中释放出痛苦的同种动物。然而，这些程序并没有消除直接社会互动和间接共情行为的作用；在救援后，痛苦的目标和具有共鸣的观察者都在相同的环境中互动，导致有可能奖励社会互动和接触是驱动啮齿动物同理心的原因[5，6]。因此，在这一期的《神经精神药理学》中，Cox和Reichel引入了一种新的行为程序来直接解决这个问题。最初，使用可操作的两室装置，作者复制了[4]雄性大鼠(称为观察者)学习链条拉动，以从充满水(痛苦条件)或空(例如，没有痛苦条件)的空间中释放痛苦的同种物质(称为靶标)，然后在干燥的空间中相互作用。值得注意的是，当作者颠倒了每一对的角色，使观察者成为目标，反之亦然，新的观察者比原来的更快地释放新的目标。这些数据表明，以前的经验促进了任务的更快获得。
Imagine you are walking and notice a person crying on the sidewalk visibly in distress. This individual is not familiar to you and has not requested any assistance, so you understandably hesitate to approach. A likely question you may ask yourself in that moment of indecision is whether you would like a stranger to offer support if you found yourself in a similar situation. Do you ultimately stop to offer emotional support? The ability to understand the circumstances of someone other than yourself is defined as empathy. Empathy is a complex behavior that facilitates the formation of social connections through interpersonal socialization and aid. A lack of empathy can contribute to the psychopathology of several neuropsychiatric diseases, including autism spectrum disorder and substance use disorder. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the psychological processes and neurobiological substrates of empathic behavior. Empathy requires a nuanced understanding of the interaction between emotions and perceptions and has been challenging—even controversial—to model in the preclinical laboratory setting. Early studies from the 1950–1960s established that rats will exhibit emotional reactions when witnessing a conspecific in distress [1, 2]. More recent work have extended these observations by showing that rats will release a distressed conspecific from restraint [3] or a water-filled compartment [4]. However, these procedures have not disambiguated the role of direct social interaction from indirect empathic behavior; both the distressed target and the empathic observer interact in the same environment after rescue, leading to the possibility that rewarding social interaction and contact is what drives rodent empathy [5, 6]. Thus, in this issue of Neuropsychopharmacology, Cox and Reichel [7] introduce a novel behavioral procedure to directly address this question.Initially, using an operant two-chamber apparatus, the authors reproduce [4] that male rats (termed Observers) learn to chain-pull to release distressed conspecifics (termed Targets) from either a water-filled (distress condition) or an empty (eg, no distress condition) chamber and subsequently interact in a dry compartment. Notably, when the authors reversed the role of each pair, such that the Observer became the Target and vice versa, new Observers were faster in releasing the new Target than the original ones. These data suggest that previous experience promotes faster acquisition of the task.