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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 8, 2026

Observational Fear as a Model of Affective Empathy in Mice
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When is emotional contagion adaptive?

Wataru Nakahashi1, Hisashi Ohtsuki1

  • 1School of Advanced Sciences, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies), Shonan Village, Hayama 240-0193, Kanagawa, Japan.

Journal of Theoretical Biology
|June 27, 2015
PubMed
Summary

Emotional contagion, copying others' emotional states, is adaptive for animals in intermediate environments. This social learning strategy offers flexibility compared to behavioral mimicry, especially when observation is challenging.

Keywords:
Behavioral mimicryEmpathyEvolutionMathematical modelSocial learning

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Area of Science:

  • Animal behavior
  • Evolutionary biology
  • Social cognition

Background:

  • Empathy is crucial for social interactions in animals.
  • Emotional contagion, a basis for empathy, involves mirroring another's emotional state.
  • Understanding the adaptive conditions for emotional contagion is key to explaining its prevalence.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To determine the ecological conditions under which emotional contagion is an adaptive strategy.
  • To compare the adaptiveness of emotional contagion with behavioral mimicry.
  • To explore the role of environmental similarity and observational difficulty in the evolution of emotional contagion.

Main Methods:

  • Mathematical modeling was employed to analyze behavioral rules.
  • The study simulated scenarios where an observer reacts to a demonstrator's behavior.
  • The models contrasted emotional contagion with behavioral mimicry.

Main Results:

  • Emotional contagion is adaptive under intermediate environmental similarity between individuals.
  • The benefits of emotional contagion over behavioral mimicry increase with observational difficulty.
  • Emotional contagion demonstrates greater flexibility than behavioral mimicry for environmental adaptation.

Conclusions:

  • Emotional contagion is often a superior social learning strategy compared to behavioral mimicry.
  • Ecological factors, such as environmental conditions and cognitive demands, favor the evolution of emotional contagion.
  • These findings help explain the frequent observation of emotional contagion in group-living animals.