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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 15, 2026

Tickling, a Technique for Inducing Positive Affect When Handling Rats
05:37

Tickling, a Technique for Inducing Positive Affect When Handling Rats

Published on: May 8, 2018

Laughing rats are optimistic.

Rafal Rygula1, Helena Pluta, Piotr Popik

  • 1Department of Behavioural Neuroscience and Drug Development, Institute of Pharmacology Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow, Poland. rygula@gmail.com

Plos One
|January 10, 2013
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Tickling rats induces positive emotions, measured by ultrasonic vocalisations (rat laughter), leading to more optimistic decision-making. This study links objectively measured positive affect to cognitive bias in an animal model.

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Area of Science:

  • Animal behavior and cognition
  • Neuroscience and affective science
  • Decision-making under uncertainty

Background:

  • Human emotions demonstrably bias judgment and decision-making.
  • Affective biases have been observed in animals, but their emotional valence was previously assumed.
  • Objective measurement of animal emotions is crucial for understanding their cognitive processes.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if objectively measured positive emotions in rats induce an affect-contingent judgment bias.
  • To establish a link between directly measured positive affective states and decision-making in an animal model.
  • To introduce a novel approach for studying the interplay between emotion and cognition in animals.

Main Methods:

  • Rats were trained in a two-lever operant task to discriminate between tones for reward or punishment avoidance.
  • Positive affective states were induced via playful experimenter-administered stimulation (tickling), with 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalisations (rat laughter) as an objective measure.
  • Decision-making bias was assessed by the rats' responses to an ambiguous intermediate-frequency tone presented immediately after stimulation.

Main Results:

  • Tickling significantly increased the emission of 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalisations, indicating a positive affective state.
  • Rats exposed to tickling exhibited more optimistic responses to the ambiguous auditory cue compared to controls.
  • This study provides the first direct evidence linking objectively measured positive emotions to decision-making bias in rats.

Conclusions:

  • Experimentally induced positive emotions, objectively indexed by rat laughter, enhance optimism in decision-making.
  • This research validates a novel tandem approach for studying emotional-cognitive interactions in animal models.
  • Findings offer valuable insights into emotional-cognitive changes relevant to mood disorders.