Using rodent models to explore the motivation of helping behaviors has become a new trend in recent years. Empathy, the alleviation of personal distress, and desire for social contact have been considered motivations for rodents to engage in helping behaviors. We used 108 Sprague-Dawley rats as subjects and modified the two-chambered helping behavior experimental setup in Carvalheiro and colleagues' study to explore the main motivations of helping behavior in rodents through three experiments. The findings suggest that (1) the desire for social contact and pursuit of an interesting environment are the primary motivations for helping behavior, regardless of the presence of a dark chamber, and (2) the alleviation of personal distress and prior experience of social contact rather than distress experience contribute to the onset and persistence of helping behavior.
The "two-system" framework of fear proposed by LeDoux and Pine (2016) sparked a discussion on the understanding of fear, prompting a reevaluation of rodent fear conditioning studies. We propose that 22kHz ultrasonic vocalizations (USV) may symbolize the subjective negative emotional states in rats. To evaluate this, we designed a series of fear conditioning experiments with varied parameters, comparing the expression of 22kHz USV and body freezing - a traditional fear index. These expressions were further assessed in fear generalization tests. Our findings suggest a distinct separation between body freezing and 22kHz vocalizations in fear conditioning under different conditions. The results indicate that 22kHz USV may more accurately signify the subjective state of fear, whereas body freezing may denote an automatic defensive response in rats. Consequently, we posit that the two-system fear framework may extend to rodent fear conditioning paradigms. Therefore, researchers should place greater emphasis on 22kHz vocalizations when investigating the subjective state of fear.
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