Bridging the gap between people and animals: The roots of social behavior and its relationship to pain

Abstract

Pain is considered a personal experience, but it is rarely private. Individuals’ responses to pain function to communicate distress to others in the environment, eliciting emotional reactions and caregiving actions that in turn impact the sufferer’s pain experience. In animals, these behaviors are considered empathy-like and indicative of a complex social framework. Laboratory experiments on animals and humans have shown that social context can have direct effects on the expression of pain. In this review, we discuss the foundations of social behavior in animal models, how they relate to empathy, and highlight shared neural mechanisms between pain and social behaviors.