Challenging Convention in Empathy Research: Developing a Mouse Model and Initial Neural Analyses

“That’s not empathy” is a response that we often hear when describing our findings to other scientists. For some of our colleagues, it is far-fetched that individuals from the species Mus musculus domesticus could be engaged in something like “empathy.” The house mouse, which in some cases has been captive and inbred by biologists for over a century, may serve as a useful “model” system to experiment on the relatively low-hanging fruit of biomedical research, but the concept of empathy goes too far. Empathy, some argue, is a high-level psychological phenomenon reserved for species possessing a highly evolved prefrontal cortex, such as Homo sapiens.