Investigating Empathy-Like Responding to Conspecifics' Distress in Pet Dogs.

ABSTRACT: Empathy covers a wide range of phenomena varying according to the degree of cognitive complexity involved; ranging from emotional contagion, defined as the sharing of others' emotional states, to sympathetic concern requiring animals to have an appraisal of the others' situation and showing concern-like behaviors. While most studies have investigated how animals reacted in response to conspecifics' distress, dogs so far have mainly been targeted to examine cross-species empathic responses. To investigate whether dogs would respond with empathy-like behavior also to conspecifics, we adopted a playback method using conspecifics' vocalizations (whines) recorded during a distressful event as well as control sounds. Our subjects were first exposed to a playback phase where they were subjected e

SUBMITTER: Quervel-Chaumette M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4849795 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature