Over the past week, I have been working on my project, and I am just about done. Here is what I have so far. I don't think it's good the way it is, so I will edit it as much as I can. Once I am done with all of the editing, I will then also make a presentation in order to show off all the stuff that I have learned.

Abstract

Scientists have once believed that empathy was an emotion only known to humans, but now it is thought otherwise. Recent studies show that empathy can now be expressed in animals as well. The theory behind this is that a rat will attempt to help another rat if it notices that it is in pain. This theory is the basis of the experiment.

The experiment was conducted by placing a small restrainer inside of a large cage and placing one rat in the restrainer and another rat on the outside. The time that the trapped rat appeared to be nervous was recorded and then converted to a percentage. For this experiment, pain was recorded as when the rat claws or bites the bars, tries to open the cage, or push through the roof.

This was done because the intended results could not be achieved. Those intended results would have been how many trials it took for the free rat to rescue its companion and how long it took. The reason the original experiment could not go on had been because the restrainer had been too complex for either rat to open.

The results showed that the amount of time that the trapped rat appeared to be in pain ranged on average from 20 to 30 percent depending on the rat and various circumstances such as whether the free rat was able to eat and the trapped rat could not.


Literature Review

Scientists across the globe for decades have been attempting to solve the mystery of whether or not it is possible for signs of empathetic emotions to be present in rodents. Nearly all of these attempts had proved to be unsuccessful until as recently as nine years ago when various neuroscientists began to piece together clues that could solve this age old question.

One of the first instances that have been successful had been revealed in the June 2006 edition of Science where Professor Langford noticed that mice demonstrate distress when they observe that a fellow mouse is experiencing pain. Contributors to this discovery include other Professors and Neuroscientists who believe that this can be seen as a major breakthrough in the sciences.

After years of further research, Langford followed up his previous claims by stating “Females display heightened social approach toward a cage mate displaying pain behavior.” This statement had been published in Langford’s Masters thesis and simply means that the female mice were more likely to help a companion in pain than the male mice.

Through this research, Langford then concluded that roughly 40 percent of the male mice made an attempt to free their trapped friends while slightly more than 65 percent of the female mice had made attempts.

Slightly more recently, Pierce began to uncover even more mysteries of empathy by bringing to light the works of CeAnn lambert, head of the Indiana Coyoye Rescue Center, Frans de Waal, a world renown primatologist, and Jaak Panksepp, an expert on animal emotion. (Journal of Environmental Philosophy, 2008)

In a 1999 documentary, Panksepp comments on the findings of joy in rats. Years earlier, Panksepp became the first to note that when domesticated rats are “tickled” a high pitched sound can be heard which is believed to be laughter. This discovery led Panksepp to dive deeper into the world of rodent psychology and behavior as shown in his multiple books which include Affective Neuroscience: the Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. (2004) This research had also led to the first known instance of fear displayed in rats.

Frans de Waal can easily be identified as one of the world’s most prominent Ethologists. Not only does de Waal study primate behavior, but a variety of other animals have been used in his work as well. His most recent piece of work, Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies (2009) shows how various behavioral aspects of a certain species of animal changes how that animal works with others as well as how that aspect can be changed over time.

Other works by de Waal include the study of differences between empathy and Altruism. For instance, de Waal states. “When animals alert other animals to an outside threat, work together, or attract others to food, biologists may speak of altruism or cooperation, but not empathy.

Towards the end of 2011, the next step had been taken in order to find signs of empathy in rats. For most of the year, Jean Decety, a neuroscientist from the University of Chicago had been working on finally answering the question that so many scientists had only been able to scratch the surface of over the past decade.

These studies have included other neurologists of the university and they have been able to prove that empathy in rats is indeed possible. The professors used treats, such as chocolate, in order to observe the reaction of the free rat in response to having to choose between the treat and the trapped companion.

The studies found that 19 of the 24 rats tested chose to free their friends instead of going after the chocolate and that three of the five rats that went for the chocolate first actually saved, on average, two of the five pieces of chocolate for their friend.

It is very well possible that in the near future, many new discoveries could be made, and that new advancements in the cognitive sciences could be made now that it had been proven that emotions that were believed to be present only in humans can now be found in rodents as well.

Discussion and Conclusion

The results were not at all what I had been hoping for. The percentage of time that the trapped rat appeared to be Nervous had not been the intended results and used once it has been realized that the intended results could not be obtained. The expected result was that the free rat would eventually attempt to release its trapped companion. If those trials were to have been successful, there would have been two main types of data that would have been collected. The first piece of data would have been how many attempts at opening the cage did the free rat make before it was successful. The idea was that if it only took one or two tries, the rat was actually trying, opposed to 7 or 8 tries.

It was then noticed that the free rat had made no attempt to rescue the trapped rat. It is believed that this happened for two reasons. The first is that the cage was not a regular rat cage and the free rat most likely could not open simply because it was too difficult. The second reason is that the rats did not know each other before the trials had begun. It would have been ideal for the rats to be housed together for a while in order to get to know one another better. This would have increased the probability that the rats would have helped each other. Instead, due to time constraints, the rats were not housed together and had only spent a short amount of time together during the trials.

For the new data, the time that the trapped rat had appeared to be nervous was recorded and then that time had been converted to a percentage. Each of the first two trials had been 15 minutes long while the trial with the cheese lasted 25 minutes and the chocolate trial took five minutes to complete. Each rat had slight differences between each other and the percentages varied between each trial. For bob, the first two trials received percentages of 23% and 20%, Bear’s trials showed 26% and 25%, and Santana’s trials showed 19% and 18%.

From these results, two ideas can be brought up. The first is that during the first trial, the trapped rat feels a certain way about being trapped and at various points throughout the trials, they try to escape. However, the percentages had dropped for each rat during the second trial, which shows that each rat had felt less nervous during the second time in the cage and had made fewer attempts to escape. The second idea is the behavior of each individual rat. Bear had been the most active and the most eager to escape; he had been clawing and biting the bars, or showing other signs of wanting to escape for 25% (4 minutes) of the second trial. Bear is the least aggressive of the three rats towards humans and other rats. Then we look at Santana, who is the most aggressive of the three. For the majority of the trials, Santana had been calm and had only appeared to be in pain 18% (just under three minutes) of the time.

When the cheese was placed in the possession of the free rat, the numbers had changed greatly, the rats that were in the cage seemed to be more eager to escape. Bob seemed to be nervous 51% of the time, Bear had been 57% of the time, and Santana had been 40% of the time. The same trends as the first two trials had continued. Bear had appeared to be more aggressive when he was the trapped rat while Santana seemed to be a lot calmer.

The results for the chocolate trial had been a bit of a surprise. It had been expected that the chocolate would have a somewhat similar effect to what happened with the cheese, that the trapped rat would feel more tempted to escape and that the free rat would feel more tempted to pay attention to the chocolate than its companion. As it turned out, the chocolate was not that popular with the rats. Only one of the free rats actually ate the chocolate and the percentages had been about the same as the first two trials that did not include any treats. Bob appeared nervous 22% of the time, Bear appeared nervous 25% of the time, and Santana appeared nervous 20% of the time. Again, just like all of the previous trials, Bear had appeared to be in the most pain while Santana appeared to be the most calm of the three.

My hypothesis stated that the free rat would help the trapped rat escape from its cage because it feels empathetic for it. This had been proven wrong, but only because of the mistakes with the cage and the housing arrangements. An experiment that is similar to this one would be successful if a fully workable restrainer is used and if the rats are young and know each other. Possible ways to improve on the research would be to repeat the experiment but by using either all female rats or by using a male-female combination.

In other words, it did not work the way I wanted it to, but I did learn quite a few interesting things.

I left out a few parts, like my introduction, and how I did the experiment, because I posted those already, but I hope you can still understand what is going on. I will be editing this over the next couple of weeks and I hope that I can submit it and get a good grade. Were most of you surprised about what I had learned by doing this experiment?

So far, this is one of my favorite assignments in college.

I am also a bit happy that I picked somebody like Frans de Waal for my research because I learned that we will be learning about him in my Philosophy class later in the year, so I am glad that I will be getting a good head start and that I know some of the things about him.