Department of Molecular Neuropharmacology, Maj Institute of Pharmacology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Smętna 12, 31-343, Krakow, Poland.
Laboratory of Emotions Neurobiology, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, 3 Pasteur Street, 02-093, Warszawa, Poland.
Sci Rep. 2023 Apr 5;13(1):5583. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-32682-6.
Prosocial behavior, defined as voluntary behavior intended to benefit another, has long been regarded as a primarily human characteristic. In recent years, it was reported that laboratory animals also favor prosocial choices in various experimental paradigms, thus demonstrating that prosocial behaviors are evolutionarily conserved. Here, we investigated prosocial choices in adult male and female C57BL/6 laboratory mice in a task where a subject mouse was equally rewarded for entering any of the two compartments of the experimental cage, but only entering of the compartment designated as "prosocial" rewarded an interaction partner. In parallel we have also assessed two traits that are regarded as closely related to prosociality: sensitivity to social reward and the ability to recognize the affective state of another individual. We found that female, but not male, mice increased frequency of prosocial choices from pretest to test. However, both sexes showed similar rewarding effects of social contact in the conditioned place preference test, and similarly, there was no effect of sex on affective state discrimination measured as the preference for interaction with a hungry or relieved mouse over a neutral animal. These observations bring interesting parallels to differences between sexes observed in humans, and are in line with reported higher propensity for prosocial behavior in human females, but differ with regard to sensitivity to social stimuli in males.
亲社会行为，定义为旨在使他人受益的自愿行为，长期以来一直被视为人类的主要特征。近年来，有报道称，实验室动物在各种实验范式中也倾向于做出亲社会选择，从而表明亲社会行为在进化上是保守的。在这里，我们在一项任务中研究了成年雄性和雌性 C57BL/6 实验室小鼠的亲社会选择，在该任务中，一只实验小鼠进入实验笼的两个隔间中的任何一个都会得到同等的奖励，但只有进入被指定为“亲社会”的隔间才会奖励与互动伙伴的互动。我们还平行评估了被认为与亲社会行为密切相关的两个特征：对社会奖励的敏感性和识别另一个个体情感状态的能力。我们发现，雌性小鼠而不是雄性小鼠从预测试到测试都增加了亲社会选择的频率。然而，两性在条件性位置偏好测试中都表现出类似的社交接触的奖励效应，同样，在对饥饿或放松的老鼠的互动偏好与中性动物的偏好的情感状态辨别方面，性别也没有影响。这些观察结果与人类性别之间观察到的差异具有有趣的相似之处，并且与报告的女性亲社会行为倾向更高一致，但在男性对社会刺激的敏感性方面存在差异。
