Empathy: Of Mice and Men

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Empathy for another's pain is apparently not limited to the nobility of the human. Some new science suggests that even mice can register this emotion:

For instance, it's tempting to explain empathetic behavior in animals that we believe to have only rudimentary cognition, such as mice, by arguing that the sight of a suffering fellow mouse simply evokes an automatic fear reaction. This study undermines that explanation by showing that mice showed empathetic reactions only with cage mates; the mice seem to go far beyond being frightened by injury to accounting for whom the injured party is -- friend, family, foe, stranger. This response is a significant step toward human-like social feeling -- toward caring for acquaintances more than for strangers, just as our empathy for someone who is hurt differs depending on whether the person is a foreigner, a national compatriot, a school chum or an immediate family member.

However, in these mice studies, an interesting anti-empathy reaction was observed among male mice:

Male (and not female) mice showed an interesting additional phenomenon when witnessing a strange male mouse in pain: its own pain sensitivity actually dropped. The counter-empathic reaction occurred only in male pairs that didn't know each other, which are probably the pairs with the greatest degree of rivalry. Was that rivalry suppressing their reaction, or did they actually feel less empathy for a strange rival?

This gender effect reminds me of a wonderful 2006 study of human Schadenfreude by Tania Singer and colleagues. They found that in both men and women, seeing the pain of a person we have just cooperated with activates pain-related brain areas. But if a man felt he had been treated unfairly by another man, his brain's pleasure centers would light up at seeing the other's pain. Such male antipathy towards rivals may be a mammalian universal.

Well, it is still a Hobbesian kind of world.


(Source: ScientificAmerican.com)

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