Receiving of emotional signal of pain from conspecifics in laboratory rats

Though recent studies have shown that rodents express emotions with their face, whether emotional expression in rodents has a communicative function between conspecifics is still unclear. Here, we demonstrate the ability of visual recognition of emotional expressions in laboratory rats. We found that Long-Evans rats avoid images of pain expressions of conspecifics but not those of neutral expressions. The results indicate that rats use visual emotional signals from conspecifics to adjust their behaviour in an environment to avoid a potentially dangerous place. Therefore, emotional expression in rodents, rather than just a mere ‘expression’ of emotional states, might have a communicative function.

• Publication year

  2015

• Venue

  Royal Society Open Science

• Publication date

  2015-04-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rsos.140381PMID 26064632PMCID 4448868
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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