Empathy Study in Rodent Model of Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

There is a highly cognitive and social context to empathy behavior in human. In various social contexts, rodents also display remarkable affective sensitivity and exhibit primitive forms of empathy similar to human. Therefore, we aimed to elaborate the concept of empathy about various components of empathetic behavior in rodents with the similar contexts of a human. In this review, we highlighted the behavioral paradigm that already examined different aspects of rodent empathetic behavior in response to conspecific distress. Additionally, we summarized homologous brain parts of human and rodents to express the empathetic behavior. Integrating the findings with corresponding experiments in the human will provide a novel insight into therapeutic intervention or expanded experimental approaches for neuropsychiatric disorders like autism spectrum disorders associated with empathetic behavior.