The emotions of rats and mice and the mental infrastructure behind them promise to illuminate the nature of human emotions, including empathy and nurturance, a Washington State University neuroscientist writes in this Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Simplified models of empathy, as in mice and rats, offer new inroads for understanding our own social-emotional nature and nurture," he writes. "Such knowledge may eventually help us promote nurturant behaviors in humans.
Animal Empathy - The ability to empathise is often considered uniquely human, the result of complex reasoning and abstract thought. But it might in fact be an incredibly simple brain process meaning that there is no reason why monkeys and other animals cannot empathise too. a sensory area of the brain called the secondary somatosensory cortex, thought only to respond to physical touch, was strongly activated by the sight of others being touched.
Question:
Humans are under the impression that they are the animal with the greatest feelings and certainly have the greatest capacity to empathize with other creatures. Is this a mistaken assumption? Why?
-There is no question that all other animals have emotional feelings. The science is strong for that. And all our
strongest basic emotional feelings come from brain networks all mammals share. Unfortunately, currently we can't scientifically compare the intensity or greatness of feelings across species.
However, because we have a greater capacity to think than most, we can do more with our emotions than other animals. We can write music. Create poetry. And because of our higher mental abilities, we also have greater capacities for both empathy among strangers and cruelty.
Still, the only way that empathy will continue to grow is if our higher mind gets in touch with the better angels of our lower minds - with maternal care and social joy being among the most important.
Question:
Why are people resisting the notion that nonhumans can have affective experiences? "Many scientists have little more than doubts. Thus, science has not yet reached agreement on how to study the many kinds of basic feelings we have, and that many other animals surely have"
