• Rats prefer to help their own kind; huma

    From ScienceDaily@1337:3/111 to All on Tue Jul 13 21:30:42 2021
    Rats prefer to help their own kind; humans may be similarly wired

    Date:
    July 13, 2021
    Source:
    University of California - Berkeley
    Summary:
    A decade after scientists discovered that lab rats will rescue a
    fellow rat in distress, but not a rat they consider an outsider,
    new research pinpoints the brain regions that drive rats to
    prioritize their nearest and dearest in times of crisis. It also
    suggests humans may share the same neural bias.



    FULL STORY ==========================================================================
    A decade after scientists discovered that lab rats will rescue a fellow
    rat in distress, but not a rat they consider an outsider, new research
    from the University of California, Berkeley, pinpoints the brain regions
    that drive rats to prioritize their nearest and dearest in times of
    crisis. It also suggests humans may share the same neural bias.


    ==========================================================================
    The findings, published today, Tuesday, July 13, in the journal eLife,
    suggest that altruism, whether in rodents or humans, is motivated by
    social bonding and familiarity rather than sympathy or guilt.

    "We have found that the group identity of the distressed rat
    dramatically influences the neural response and decision to help,
    revealing the biological mechanism of ingroup bias," said study senior
    author Daniela Kaufer, a professor of neuroscience and integrative
    biology at UC Berkeley.

    With nativism and conflicts between religious, ethnic and racial groups
    on the rise globally, the results suggest that social integration,
    rather than segregation, may boost cooperation among humans.

    "Priming a common group membership may be a more powerful driver for
    inducing pro-social motivation than increasing empathy," said study lead
    author Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, an assistant professor of psychobiology at Tel-Aviv University in Israel.

    Bartal launched the study in 2014 as a postdoctoral Miller fellow in
    Kaufer's laboratory at UC Berkeley. Bartal, Kaufer and UC Berkeley
    psychology professor Dacher Keltner led a research team that sought to
    identify the brain networks activated in rats in response to empathy,
    and whether they are mirrored in humans. The results suggest they are.



    ==========================================================================
    "The finding of a similar neural network involved in empathic helping
    in rats, as in humans, provides new evidence that caring for others is
    based on a shared neurobiological mechanism across mammals," Bartal said.

    Using fiber photometry, immunohistochemistry, calcium imaging and other diagnostic tools, researchers found that all the rats they studied
    experienced empathy in response to another rat's signs of distress.

    However, to act on that empathy, the helper rat's neural reward circuitry
    had to be triggered, and that only occurred if the trapped rat was of
    the same type as the helper rat, or member of its ingroup.

    "Surprisingly, we found that the network associated with empathy
    is activated when you see a distressed peer, whether they are in the
    ingroup or not," Kaufer said. "In contrast, the network associated with
    reward signaling was active only for ingroup members and correlated with helping behavior." Specifically, the rats' empathy correlated with the
    brain's sensory and orbitofrontal regions, as well as with the anterior
    insula. Meanwhile, the rodents' decision to help was linked to activity
    in the nucleus accumbens, a reward center with neurotransmitters that
    include dopamine and serotonin.



    ==========================================================================
    For the study, more than 60 pairs of caged rats were monitored over
    the course of two weeks. Some of the pairs were of the same strain or
    genetic tribe while others were not.

    In each trial, one rat would be trapped inside a transparent cylinder
    while the other roamed free in a larger enclosure surrounding the
    cylinder.

    While unconstrained rats consistently signaled empathy in response to
    the plight of trapped rats, they only worked to free those that were
    part of their ingroup, in which case they would lean or butt their heads against the cage door to release the rat.

    Indeed, in reviewing the results of multiple measures to understand the
    neural roots of that bias, the research team found that while all the
    rodents in the trials sensed their cage partner's distress, their brains' reward circuitry was only activated when they came to the rescue of a
    member of their ingroup.

    Moreover, humans and other mammals share virtually the same empathy and
    reward regions in the brain, implying that we may have similar biases
    toward our ingroup when it comes to helping others, Bartal noted.

    "Overall, the findings suggest that empathy alone doesn't predict helping behavior, and that's really a crucial point," she said. "So, if you want
    to motivate people to help others who are suffering, it may be that you
    have to increase their feeling of belonging and group membership, and
    work toward a common identity." "Encouragingly," she added, "we find
    that this mechanism is very flexible and determined primarily by social experience. We will now try to understand how pro-social motivation
    shifts when rats become friends, and how that is reflected in their
    brain activity." Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pmrTLkz3ms&t=1s ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
    University_of_California_-_Berkeley. Original written by Yasmin
    Anwar. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, Jocelyn M Breton, Huanjie Sheng, Kimberly
    LP Long,
    Stella Chen, Aline Halliday, Justin W Kenney, Anne L Wheeler,
    Paul Frankland, Carrie Shilyansky, Karl Deisseroth, Dacher Keltner,
    Daniela Kaufer. Neural correlates of ingroup bias for prosociality
    in rats.

    eLife, 2021; 10 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.65582 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210713165303.htm

    --- up 9 weeks, 4 days, 22 hours, 45 minutes
    * Origin: -=> Castle Rock BBS <=- Now Husky HPT Powered! (1337:3/111)