Final Report Summary - VICARIOUSBRAIN (Cracking the code and flow of empathy)
How do we perceive the emotions of others? Why do we care about what other people feel? Why do we become distressed, when we witness the distress of others? In this grant, we developed an animal model of empathy, in which rodents show that they care about the emotions of others. We studied neural responses during that process and found that cells involved in the animals' own emotional experiences become reactivated while witnessing the same emotion in others. We found that preventing the activity of this system prevented the animals from showing signs of emotional contagion. We further found that the brain does not only react to what it sees other do, but actively predicts what others do using our own motor system. Jointly these results open a window into the cellular mechanism of our sensitivity to the emotions of others. By further characterizing the molecular peculiarities of these neurons, our work may be a first step towards the developments of therapies that target these cellular mechanisms in disorders in which the sensitivity to other people's emotions is disturbed.