![]() ![]() But Bartal wanted to know if this “emotional contagion” wouldĪctually motivate rats to help one another. It seemed that rats are sensitive to each other’s emotions,’catching’ them from one another. ![]() She showed that mice become more sensitive to pain when they see their cagemates in it. In 2006, Dale Langford from McGill University returned to Church’s work and produced more evidence that rats can feel empathy. In later years, the taboo on animal empathy began to lift and people became happier to ascribe it to the wider animal kingdom. “No one knew what to do with the studies, and they were forgotten,” says Frans de Waal, who studies how animals think. Psychologists were mostly interested in what animals did rather than what they felt, and the dominant view of nature red in tooth and claw left little room for cuddly feelings of empathy or altruism. That’s not what happened – when the first rat saw what was going on, it forfeited its food and avoided the lever.Ĭhurch’s published his results in a provocative paper called “Emotional reactions of rats to the pain of others”, which sparked a flurry of similar studies throughout the 1960s. If the first rat pressed the lever, the second one would get a painful shock. ![]() Then, he connected the lever to the electrified floor of a cage containing another rat. ![]()
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