When someone smiles at us, we tend to smile back, but if we spend time with someone who is angry or stressed, we end up absorbing these negative emotions. This tendency to align with the emotions of others is called emotional contagion and it is a basic form of empathy that has been programmed into our brains for thousands of years.
But this behavior It is not exclusive to humans. New data from the Gulbenkian Institute of Science (IGC) have confirmed that the mechanisms we use to synchronize emotions go back to the oldest group of vertebrates, fish.
In their most recent work, the IGC team led by Rui Oliveira has tried to understand whether, like humans and other mammals, zebrafish need oxytocin to adopt the emotions of others.
Experiments they have carried out have shown that when fish similar to those found in the wild see a school in distress, they mirror their behaviour. On the other hand, fish with genetic alterations in oxytocin or its receptors continue to swim normally even when they see their congeners in danger. This demonstrates that this molecule is necessary to sow fearfor example, when one of the members of the school is injured.
“We found that these observers approach the endangered school even when it returns to swimming normally, while the mutated fish prefer to be close to the group that had always been in a neutral state. This means that, through oxytocin, zebrafish decodes e mimics the emotional state behind the movements of the neighboring bank and begins to behave in a similar way,” the experts have said.
But oxytocin isn’t the only common factor between fish and humans when it comes to emotional contagion. “For recognize and match emotionszebrafish use brain areas equivalent to some of those that humans also use for this purpose,” explained lead researcher Rui Oliveira.
This makes these fish the perfect model to study this social behavior and its neural mechanisms. In this way, these findings open the way to the understanding of how they affect the emotions of others and how this shapes well-being and that of society, with implications ranging from public health and politics to the marketing.