Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Meibergdreef 47, 1105 Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Meibergdreef 47, 1105 Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Curr Biol. 2020 Mar 23;30(6):949-961.e7. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.01.017. Epub 2020 Mar 5.
Empathy, the ability to share another individual's emotional state and/or experience, has been suggested to be a source of prosocial motivation by attributing negative value to actions that harm others. The neural underpinnings and evolution of such harm aversion remain poorly understood. Here, we characterize an animal model of harm aversion in which a rat can choose between two levers providing equal amounts of food but one additionally delivering a footshock to a neighboring rat. We find that independently of sex and familiarity, rats reduce their usage of the preferred lever when it causes harm to a conspecific, displaying an individually varying degree of harm aversion. Prior experience with pain increases this effect. In additional experiments, we show that rats reduce the usage of the harm-inducing lever when it delivers twice, but not thrice, the number of pellets than the no-harm lever, setting boundaries on the magnitude of harm aversion. Finally, we show that pharmacological deactivation of the anterior cingulate cortex, a region we have shown to be essential for emotional contagion, reduces harm aversion while leaving behavioral flexibility unaffected. This model of harm aversion might help shed light onto the neural basis of psychiatric disorders characterized by reduced harm aversion, including psychopathy and conduct disorders with reduced empathy, and provides an assay for the development of pharmacological treatments of such disorders. VIDEO ABSTRACT.
同理心，即分享他人情绪状态和/或体验的能力，被认为是亲社会动机的来源，因为它将对他人造成伤害的行为归因于负面价值。这种伤害回避的神经基础和进化仍然知之甚少。在这里，我们描述了一种伤害回避的动物模型，在该模型中，大鼠可以在两个提供等量食物的杠杆之间进行选择，但其中一个杠杆会对附近的大鼠施加电击。我们发现，无论性别和熟悉程度如何，当伤害同种大鼠时，大鼠会减少对首选杠杆的使用，表现出个体差异程度的伤害回避。先前的疼痛经历会增强这种效果。在额外的实验中，我们表明，当伤害诱导杠杆给予的小球数量是无伤害杠杆的两倍而不是三倍时，大鼠会减少对伤害诱导杠杆的使用，从而对伤害回避的程度设定了界限。最后，我们表明，前扣带皮层的药理学失活——我们已经证明该区域对于情绪传染是必不可少的——会降低伤害回避，同时不影响行为灵活性。这种伤害回避模型可能有助于揭示以伤害回避减少为特征的精神障碍的神经基础，包括同理心减少的精神病和品行障碍，并为开发此类障碍的药物治疗方法提供了一种测定方法。视频摘要。
