Subjects: Psychology >> Experimental Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Physiological Psychology submitted time 2023-03-10
Abstract： As a kind of prosocial behavior, helping behavior is universal across species. In recent years, it has become a new trend for scholars at home and abroad to use rodent models to explore the motivation of helping behavior. Empathy, relieving personal distress and desire for social contacts are considered to be plausible motivations for rodents to help, but debates about whether helping behavior is inspired by one of the motives or a combination of them still exist. In this study, in order to explore the motivation of helping behavior in rodents, the two-chamber experimental apparatus designed by Carvalheiro et al. (2019) was improved by adding an intermediate chamber to manipulate the possibility of the free rat's social contact with the entrapped rats after implementing the helping behavior as well as the possibility of the free rat's escaping from the helping context to relieve its personal distress in the process of helping decision-making. 108 male Sprague– Dawley rats were used as subjects in three experiments. The latency to open the door for helping the entrapped rat escape was recorded as the main outcome variable. Experiment 1 confirmed the existence of helping behavior and the impact of social contact on helping behavior under the condition of being unable to escape from the helping context, using a 2 (possibility of social contact: yes/no) by 4 (restrainer condition: empty restrainer, familiar rat, unfamiliar rat, toy rat) mixed experimental design. The results show that when social contact was allowed, the free rat maintained a consistently short latency to help, but when social contact was not allowed, the free rat’s latency to help became longer and longer as sessions went on until that the free rat no longer helped at all within the 15min session limit. Experiment 2 explored the impact of social contact on helping behavior under the condition of being able to escape from the helping context, using the same experimental design as Study 1 but keeping the door between the middle chamber and the dark chamber open. The results show that the existence of the dark chamber was beneficial for the non-social contact group to help continuously, but extended the latency to help in the social contact group, namely, relieving personal distress contributes to the emergence of helping behavior, but the emergence of helping behavior ultimately depends on whether social contact could be made. Experiment 3 explored the influence of previous social contact experience and current social contact possibility on helping behavior under the condition of the free rats’ having been trapped before, using a 2(possibility of social contact: yes/no) by 2 (previous social contact experience: yes/no) by 4 (restrainer conditions: empty restrainer, familiar rat, unfamiliar rat, toy rat) mixed experimental design. The results show that previous experiences of being trapped did not affect helping behavior, but previous experiences of social contact were conducive to maintain continuous helping behavior in the non-social contact group. In summary, the following conclusions were obtained through this study: (1) Desires for social contact and the pursuit of interesting environment are important motivations for rodents’ helping behavior, regardless of the possibility to escape from the helping context. (2) Relieving personal distress can help sustain helping behavior, but the emergence of helping behavior ultimately depends on whether social contact can be carried out after helping. (3) Previous experiences of social contact rather than the experiences of having been trapped contribute to the occurrence of helping behavior. (4) Empathy may not the main reason to maintain helping behavior but rather can be used to describe the process of helping behavior. This study extends the comparative research on the motivation of helping behavior and provides some hints for the psychological development and educational practices in humans.
Subjects: Psychology >> Experimental Psychology Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2021-05-29
Abstract： [Objective] Cultivating the next generation of sound emotional, cognitive and socio-behavioral development is fundamental to human civilization, and the impact of early experiences cannot be ignored from the point of view of probabilistic epigenesis. This study aims to investigate the causal relationship between early experiences and later behavioral development based on a novel experimental model termed the “human-rat interaction paradigm” (HRIP). [Methods] Thirty-six one-month-old male Sprague-Dawley rats were selected as subjects. Based on the HRIP, three groups (Positive early experiences (PEE) / Negative early experiences (NEE) / Control) were intervened for 3 weeks, and the effects of the manipulation of early experiences on behavioral development were tested through a battery of behavioral paradigms. [Results] The results showed that: 1) During the emotional behavior tests, compared with the other two groups, the PEE group was more active in the open arm of the O-maze, more active in the center area of the open field, ate faster in the new and familiar environment, and had less hesitation to adapt to and utilize the new learning device. 2) During the learning behavior tests, the PEE group showed most rule-breaking exploratory behavior in the integrated-learning maze; while the majority of the NEE group learned to open the gate during the early stage of procedural learning, the firmness of their long-term memory was the lowest during the new object recognition task; the control group was overall passive during the whole series of learning behavior tests. 3) During the social behavior tests, the PEE group showed the most interests towards the toy rat, while the NEE group showed the most aversion towards the toy rat. At the same time, while all groups preferred a real rat to a toy rat, only the intervention groups (both PEE and NEE) showed clear preference in interacting with a real stranger rat to a real familiar rat. Moreover, during the empathy and pro-social behavioral tests, when there were no food rewards, all three groups of rats generally would open the gate to rescue the entrapped rat, and after multiple trials their latency to rescue became shorter and shorter; however, when there were food rewards to be shared with the entrapped rat, both the PEE and NEE groups were less likely to open the gate, and after multiple trials, their latency to rescue became longer and longer. When the entrapped rat was unable to reach the food reward without the subject’s active sharing, the NEE group showed much more frequent behavior of feeding interruption and vigilant sniffing, possibly for fear of losing the food to the entrapped rat. 4) During the social competition tests, when there were no food rewards in the tube test, the control group had the highest success rate; when there were food rewards to be competed for, the PEE group had the highest success rate. At the same time, the degree of social rank differentiation was smallest in the control group and largest in the PEE group. The NEE group showed clear differentiation between the high-rank individual and the middle/low-ranked individual. The success rate of the NEE group was overall the lowest during the inter-group social competition tests. [Conclusions] We arrived at the following conclusions: 1) On the long run, the early experience intervention based on the HRIP will have sustained and stable effects on the behavioral development. 2) Rich early experiences can improve the sensitivity to learning and social rules. Lack of early experiences can passivate learning and social behavior. 3) Positive early experience can promote the individual to have more interests in exploring "objects", produce more rule-breaking exploratory behavior and maintain the stability of goal behavior; in contrast, negative early experience can cause excessive arousal of negative emotions, inhibit exploration and interfere with the maintenance of goal behavior."
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