Empathy is an essential function for humans as social animals. Emotional contagion, the basic form of afffective empathy, comprises the cognitive process of perceiving and sharing the affective state of others. The observational fear assay, an animal model of emotional contagion, has enabled researchers to undertake molecular, cellular, and circuit mechanism of this behavior. Such studies have revealed that observational fear is mediated through neural circuits involved in processing the affective dimension of direct pain experiences. A mouse can also respond to milder social stimuli induced by either positive or negative emotional changes in another mouse, which seems not dependent on the affective pain circuits. Further studies should explore how different neural circuits contribute to integrating different dimensions of affective empathy.

中文翻译：

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啮齿动物的情感同理心和亲社会行为。

同理心是人类作为社会动物的基本功能。情绪传染是情感移情的基本形式，包括感知和分享他人情感状态的认知过程。观察性恐惧试验是一种情绪传染的动物模型，使研究人员能够研究这种行为的分子、细胞和电路机制。此类研究表明，观察性恐惧是通过参与处理直接疼痛体验的情感维度的神经回路介导的。一只老鼠也可以对另一只老鼠的积极或消极情绪变化引起的较温和的社会刺激做出反应，这似乎不依赖于情感疼痛回路。进一步的研究应该探索不同的神经回路如何有助于整合情感移情的不同维度。