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Rats can recognize pain in peers' faces

When given a choice, lab rats avoided being around photos of other rats in pain.

By Brooks Hays

LONDON, April 1 (UPI) -- Despite all the disrespect, rats just keep quietly proving their common decency. They momentarily warmed our hearts, elevating peasant food to mouth-watering new heights on the big screen in Ratatouille. Now, it turns out, they also communicate emotions.

According to a new study, rats are able to recognize pain in the faces of their fellow rats.

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Of course, rats have rather small faces compared to humans and apes, animals famous for their ability to communicate emotion. But rats do show pain in their face -- flattening their face, squinting their eyes, wiggling their whiskers and puffing out their cheeks and nose.

Scientists wondered: was this simply a physical reaction, or was it also a form of communication?

To find out, researchers dropped newbie lab rats -- never before involved in an experiment -- into a series of interconnected rooms. Some rooms featured pictures of rats' bodies and faces in neutral poses. One room featured photos of rats in pain, having just been given an electric shock.

The test rats spent the least amount of time in the room full of pain pics, suggesting they can recognize the agony in their relatives' faces.

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The results may have been a bit more heartwarming had the rats decided to stick with their pained buds for solidarity's sake -- but it's revealing science nonetheless.

"Therefore," researchers wrote of their findings, "emotional expression in rodents, rather than just a mere 'expression' of emotional states, might have a communicative function."

The new research was published this week in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

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