Prosocial Behavior and Empathy Lecture Notes Part 1

Flashcards related to prosocial behavior, empathy, and observational fear learning.

Prosocial Behavior

Actions intended to benefit others and produce positive social outcomes. May also provide personal rewards.

Altruism

A subset of prosocial behavior involving helping others without expectation of reward, and sometimes at a personal cost.

Empathic Concern

A key motivator of prosocial and altruistic behavior.

Emotional Contagion

Automatic mirroring of another’s emotional state (e.g., feeling distressed when seeing someone else in distress).

Sympathy

Concern for another’s well-being without necessarily sharing their emotional state.

Empathy

Sharing or understanding another’s emotional state in a way that reflects their perspective.

Mirror Neurons

Neurons that fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe someone else performing the same action.

Perspective Taking

The tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others

Fantasy

Tendencies to transpose themselves imaginatively into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters

Empathic Concern

Assessments of "other-oriented" feelings of sympathy and concern for unfortunate others.

Personal Distress

Measurements of "self-oriented" feelings of personal anxiety and unease in tense interpersonal settings

Ultrasonic vocalization (USV)

Calls emitted by laboratory rats associated with various distress states (e.g., fear, stress).

Observational fear learning

A type of learning where fear can be acquired vicariously through social observation of others suffering from aversive stimuli.

Female rats

Rat: trapped rat experiment: who shows more empathy?

Siblings

Mice show more learning in fear conditioning/fear in general when with…

No

Is there evidence of social transmission or contagion of fear in rats?

Amygdala

What is imperative for fear ultrasonic conditioning?