For social animals like humans, being able to recognize and react to the emotional states of others is extremely important. One particularly important aspect of this ability is empathy. In this context, this specifically refers to understanding when another person is in mental distress.
However, people can have very different reactions when they see someone in such distress. These reactions fall into two broad categories. There are prosocial responses. This means reaching out to those who are suffering and providing care and comfort. However, there are also antisocial reactions, where seeing someone suffering causes similar suffering and emotional distress in the witness, causing them to back away from the situation and focus on their own emotions.
The nature of a person’s reaction is strongly influenced by their own history, particularly whether they have had experiences similar to what they are witnessing. a new paper Published on December 12th natural neuroscience My research focuses on the neurocognitive basis of how negative self-experiences influence responses to emotional distress in others.
The ability to recognize and respond to the emotions of others is not limited to humans, and many other mammals have shown similar abilities. However, the extent to which negative self-experiences influence other animals is less clear. The authors of this paper investigated whether mice’s reactions to meeting others in stressful situations influenced their responses, and found that the experience indeed had a similar effect as in humans. I discovered that. This suggests that human empathy may have a similar neurological basis to mouse empathy.
The researchers found that mice that the paper called “negative self-experienced” mice, or mice that had experiences similar to what they were witnessing, were better overall than “naive mice.” They found that they tended to exhibit antisocial and avoidant behavior. Mice that don’t have the same experience.
They also found that hormones and social class played a role in the effects of negative self-experience. For men, position in the social hierarchy was important. Dominant male mice were more likely to exhibit antisocial reactions than other male mice. Female mice, on the other hand, were affected by estrus (heat), and mice in heat seemed completely unaffected by negative self-experiences.
The study also investigated the neurological basis of these results. In humans, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) plays an important role in stress relief and social cognition, so the researchers theorized that the same might be true in mice. To test this idea, the researchers suppressed activity in the mPFC in some mice. In particular, it suppressed the activity of a group of neurons that produce a hormone called corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), which is known to be involved in the response to stress. The paper describes it as a “master regulator of the stress-coping response.” )
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When the researchers inhibited the function of these neurons, they found that mice with these negative self-experiences had an increased tendency toward prosocial responses.[This] The amount of social exploration for stress demonstrators was reestablished, but it was reduced in the group with negative self-experiences. ” They also found that inhibiting these neurons increased prosocial responses in “naïve” mice, i.e., mice that do not have negative self-experiences. In contrast, intentional activation of these cells had no effect on naïve mice, but increased avoidance behavior in mice with negative self-experience.
The paper concludes that in mice, “the influence of self-experience on stress emotion recognition is modulated by CRF activity in the mPFC.” Because the mPFC and CRF play similar roles in humans, the study’s lead author, Federica Marta, said that targeting mPFC CRF neurons “aims to ameliorate the observed changes in emotional responses.” This could be useful in clinical research to develop new targeted therapies.” They are in various mental states. ” Identifying the neurocognitive basis of empathy may also open new possibilities for treating conditions in which empathy and understanding of other people’s emotions are suppressed, such as PTSD, autism, and schizophrenia.
