Empathy and Animals

For a long time, it was thought that empathy was unique to primates, or even humans. But in the past few years, several experiments seem to indicate rats and mice feel each other's pain, too.

Catching Emotions

The simplest form of empathy is known as emotional contagion. It's a phenomenon where one individual's emotions spread to other individuals nearby. For instance, if one baby in a nursery cries, it triggers the other babies in the room to cry as well. Emotional contagion allows humans and other animals to share emotional experiences, and there is strong evidence it exists in rodents.

by Mary Bates

The study's authors say while we tend to place pigs in a lower category to animals such as dogs and cats, they are in fact, just as smart and empathic – and should be treated as such....

A study earlier this year also found pigs have empathy. Researchers in the Netherlands housed pigs in 16 groups of six, training two of the animals in each of the groups...

 By ELLIE ZOLFAGHARIFARD

Budgerigars, also known as parakeets, are susceptible to catching the urge to yawn from watching other budgies do it.

[What yawning bonobos can teach us about empathy]'

Some researchers, including Gallup, believe that contagious yawning behavior in different species could be connected to a primitive form of empathy.

Frans de Waal of Emory University in Georgia told the New Scientistthat "contagious yawning by itself is not exactly empathy, but it hints at the tendency to mimic and synchronize with the bodies of others" and that the "process is probably the basis of mammalian empathy."

Although Gallup's experiments don't tell us everything about the contagious yawning behavior among budgies, it has potentially interesting implications for future experiments. "Since contagious yawning may represent a primitive form of empathy,"

Professor Marc Bekoff teaches a popular animal behavior course at the Boulder County Jail, which has helped some inmates bond with the natural world—and ultimately reconnect to society.

Empathy is a human trait, but it isn't unique to humans. Our closest relatives, primates, will help each other out. Elephants bury their dead and giraffe moms who lost a calf are often flanked with other giraffe females during her time of grief. So, how far down the food chain does this trait go?

We prefer not to think about rats as related to us, but our common ancestor might have been around a few millions of years ago, according to the BBC. They aren't that much like us... but a new study shows that rats will save their rat buddies from drowning.

If one rat is drowning, another will step in to save it. The new finding suggests that these rodents feel empathy

The rats therefore engage in helpful "prosocial behaviour" even if there was no apparent reward. Saving a distressed rat was valuable to them.

Past experience played a role too. If the saviour rat had had a similar near-death experience, it was much quicker to help....

Published in the journal Animal Cognition, the research suggests that rats may have empathy, and that they recognise the suffering of others and want to alleviate it.

The effects of compassion are far reaching and have been shown to have benefits for physical as well as psychological health. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that social support, when humans connect in a meaningful way with other people or animals, helps in the recovery from illness as well as promoting increased levels of mental and physical well-being.

Evidence from studies mentioned in the previous blog suggests that interventions can lead to reduced depressive symptoms and feelings of isolation, improvements in positive emotions, psychological well-being, hopefulness, optimism, social connection, life satisfaction, and, of specific interest to this paper –  compassion....

Cultivating compassion for all living beings and practicing a compassionate lifestyle can, therefore, help boost social connection and also improve physical and mental health. 

Massey University PhD student Mirjam Guesgen has spent three years studying whether sheep feel empathy. 

Guesgen said the idea of animals feeling empathy and pain was a relatively new area of research, but she was interested in the social and psychological aspects of animals.

"We can just ask someone, we look at their outward expression. 
"Why do animals show pain at all?"
And because there are routine husbandry practices involving pain, like docking, sheep were a good animal to start looking to for answers. 

THOMAS HEATON

1. Compassion: According to this overview of the scientific literature by Nienke Endenburg and Ben Baarda in The Waltham Book of Human-Animal Interaction, 

"If there are pets in the house, parents and children frequently share in taking care of the pet, which suggests that youngsters learn at an early age how to care for and nurture a dependent animal." Even very young children can contribute to the care and feeding of a pet — a 3-year-old can take a bowl of food and set it on the floor for a cat, and at the same age, a child can be taught to stroke an animal nicely, maybe using the back of the hand so they don't grab the animal. Supervising kids during the first few interactions is a teaching moment.

Later, once they have learned the ropes, their memory and understanding of a life outside themselves will be stimulated each time they interact with the animals. Older kids can be responsible for walking a dog or playing with it in the yard, cleaning out a cat's litter box, or taking veggie scraps from dinner to a rabbit or hamster.

A study of 3- to 6-year-olds found that kids with pets had more empathy towards other animals and human beings, while another study found that even just having an animal in a classroom made fourth-graders more compassionate. 

A dog, cat, guinea pig or iguana can be a child's best friend in ways you might not expect. Research shows how pets can benefit a child's physical and emotional well-being.

It's easy to see how pets can teach children responsibility. A child as young as 3 can be responsible for giving pets water, and older children can take on tasks like walking the dog.

"Accomplishing tasks appropriate to their age, when taking care of the pet with their parents, makes a child feel more competent," according to child development experts Nienke Endenburg and Ben Baarda.
In addition to increasing self-efficacy, having pets can develop a child's relationship skills, especially empathy, The Washington Post reported. "The reason is obvious: Caring for a pet draws a self-absorbed child away from himself or herself."

Marsha Maxwell, 

Human beings are the most intelligent, and therefore important, of all the world´s species, right?

We deserve our superior status over other animals because of the following scientific truths: that only humans are self-aware and feel empathy, that we are unique in our abilities to use language and tools, that only we can recognize ourselves in a mirror and understand the passing of time.

But advances in cognitive ethology (the scientific study of animal intelligence, emotions, behaviors, and social life) have now disproved these ´truths´, showing that many other creatures also display a complex range of emotions, highly evolved communication skills, compassion for others, and even intelligence that rivals- or surpasses- our own. These ground-breaking studies force us to ask some uncomfortable questions about our place in the world, and have caused leading experts to call for a radical rethink of the way we treat other animals...

Some of the most heart-warming tales of expressive love and empathy come from the great apes, our closest relatives. Moral philosopher Mark Rowlands recounts the following:

By: Sophie McAdam,

 A unique form of therapy involving four-legged companions is growing in popularity, and recently therapists from around the nation gathered in Farmington to learn more about the benefits of using horses in therapy....

Thrap now helps veterans suffering from PTSD. Therapists said horses have a sense of empathy.

“They’re uniquely wired to be aware of their surroundings and to interact with their surroundings in a way that harnesses their intuition, and so they’re just very sensitive beings,” Kaschel said

by Arlene Weintraub 
During the 60 Minutes story we heard a lot about oxytocin, commonly called “the love hormone.” This is a hormone, made in the brains of both dogs and people, that promotes the bonding between mothers and their babies, for example, and makes us feel good when we hug a loved one. Turns out when dogs make eye contact with their people or jump in their laps, both dogs and the recipients of their affection get more of an oxytocin rush.

But are dogs empathetic? Do they feel our emotional pain and joy? Several studies suggest they do. For example, in 2013, a group of Japanese researchers showed that the phenomenon of contagious yawning—long believed to be a sign of empathy—does not just happen among people. The scientists observed 25 dogs yawning in response to the yawns of both their owners and those of people they did not know. They measured the dogs’ heart rate to show that their yawning was not caused by stress (as many dog trainers believe it is).

Dogs may also be empathetic because in addition to sharing the love hormone with their humans, they share the stress hormone, called cortisol.

The researchers concluded that the dogs were showing “emotional contagion,” a basic form of empathy. What’s more, the empathy crossed species—a rare occurrence, they suggested.

 by Penny Sarchet

The common pet budgerigar is loved for its ability to mimic its owners. But it has another special trick – it can catch yawns from other budgies, suggesting it has some kind of empathy.

"Practically all vertebrates yawn," says Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni of City University, London. In 2008, he showed that dogs can catch yawns from humans. The only other species shown to yawn contagiously are humans,chimpanzees and a type of rodent called the high-yawning Sprague-Dawley rat. But Andrew Gallup of the State University of New York and his colleagues have now shown for the first time that the same happens for a species of non-mammals....

But the finding in budgies isn't just a cute novelty; because contagious yawning seems to be linked with empathetic processes, Gallup says this suggests that other social non-mammals may have basic forms of empathy.

The ideologies of slavery that kept human beings classified as property for hundreds of years continue to be used today to oppress non-human animals. Does this statement make you uncomfortable?...

As humans, we can only directly relate to what it’s like to be human – and sometimes even that is incredibly difficult — but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Our ability to empathize allows us to have compassion for people who are suffering; extending that compassion to non-human animals, whether we have definitive proof of their emotions or not, is the more humane choice.

Jessie Huart Sullivan

Empathy is a human trait, but it isn't unique to humans. Our closest relatives, primates, will help each other out. Elephants bury their dead and giraffe moms who lost a calf are often flanked with other giraffe females during her time of grief. So, how far down the food chain does this trait go?

We prefer not to think about rats as related to us, but our common ancestor might have been around a few millions of years ago, according to the BBC. They aren't that much like us... but a new study shows that rats will save their rat buddies from drowning.

But as Discovery magazine reported, there is one thing rats do seem to really care about: each other.

Some scientists ran an experiment to demonstrate that. Here's how it worked:

1. The scientists put a rat in water (which rats hate). Not enough to hurt the rat, but enough to annoy it.
2. Then they put another rat in a safer, dry area with a door it could open to save the first rat.

by Adam Mordecai

We’ve all heard how rats will abandon a sinking ship. But will the rodents attempt to save their companions in the process? A new study shows that rats will, indeed, rescue their distressed pals from the drink—even when they’re offered chocolate instead.

They’re also more likely to help when they’ve had an unpleasant swimming experience of their own, adding to growing evidence that the rodents feel empathy.

By Emily Underwood 

It is certainly the case that hearing a baby cry can be quite distressing to humans. We respond to the sound with increased attention, namely we get up and check on the crying child. Our body also responds to this sound in another way — specifically by releasing the stress hormone cortisol. This emotionally based stress response happens regardless of our age, parenting experience, or gender. Both the mother and daughter that I observed seemed to assume that dogs are wired to react in the same way that people do when they hear a baby cry, but is this true? A recent study published in the journal Behavioural Processes* suggests that this might in fact that is be the case....

Whether what we are seeing in dogs in this case is true empathy or not, it is another example of the fact that dogs do pay attention to human feelings.

Furthermore these new data tend to confirm other observations that the emotional responses of dogs tends to reflect the moods that they observe in the people around them.  

Stanley Coren

The subjects in the experiment did not know the articles were bogus. Nor did they know that there were actually four slightly different versions of the newspaper articles, each portraying a different victim: a puppy, an adult dog, a human infant, or a human adult. After they read one of the four news stories, each subject completed a scale which measured how much empathy and emotional distress they felt for the victim of the beating.

Arluke and Levin reported the results of their study at the 2013 meeting of the American Sociological Association. As you might guess, the story in which the victim was a human adult elicited, by far, the lowest levels of emotional distress in the readers.

The “winner” when it came to evoking empathy was not the puppy but the human infant. The puppy, however, came in a close second with the adult dog not far behind.

Arluke and Levin concluded that species is important when it comes to generating sympathy with the downtrodden. But they argued that the critical difference in responses to the stories was based on our special concern for creatures that are innocent and defenseless.

by HAL HERZOG

One of the cornerstones of EQ is empathy, which should be taught and modeled starting in early childhood. A variety of research in the U.S. and Britain, including by the late psychologist Robert Poresky of Kansas State University, has shown a correlation between attachment to a pet and higher empathy scores.

The reason is obvious: Caring for a pet draws a self-absorbed child away from himself or herself.

Empathy also involves the ability to read nonverbal cues — facial expressions, body language, gestures — and pets offer nothing but nonverbal cues. Hearing a kitten yowl when it wants to eat or seeing a dog run to the door when it wants to go outside get kids to think, “What are their needs, and what can I do to help?”

By Denise Daniels

image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog