Emotional contagion, the emotional state‐matching of an individual with another, seems to
be crucial for many social species. In recent years evidence on emotional contagion in …

Social animals must detect, evaluate and respond to the emotional states of other
individuals in their group. A constellation of gestures, vocalizations, and chemosignals …

Empathy, the ability to share another individual's emotional state and/or experience, has
been suggested to be a source of prosocial motivation by attributing negative value to …

Severe stress exposure increases the risk of stress-related disorders such as major
depressive disorder (MDD). An essential characteristic of MDD is the impairment of social …

Here we leverage 80 years of emotional contagion research in rodents and perform the first
meta-analysis on this topic. Using 457 effect sizes, we show that, while both rats and mice …

Highlights•Rodents can communicate positive and negative affective states among
conspecifics.•The primary modality for affective state communication among rodents is …

Social interactions are shaped by features of the interactants, including age, emotion, sex,
and familiarity. Age-specific responses to social affect are evident when an adult male rat is …

Affective empathy, the ability to share the emotions of others, is an important contributor to
the richness of our emotional experiences. Here, we review evidence that rodents show …

Emotional contagion, the ability to feel what other individuals feel without necessarily
understanding the feeling or knowing its source, is thought to be an important element of …

The cellular mechanisms of emotional contagion are unknown. We investigated tickle
contagion and the underlying neuronal representations in playful rats. We recorded trunk …