Effect of pitch range on dogs’ response to conspecific vs. heterospecific distress cries

Distress cries are emitted by many mammal species to elicit caregiving attention. Across taxa, these calls tend to share similar acoustic structures, but not necessarily frequency range, raising the question of their interspecific communicative potential. As domestic dogs are highly responsive to human emotional cues and experience stress when hearing human cries, we explore whether their responses to distress cries from human infants and puppies depend upon sharing conspecific frequency range or species-specific call characteristics. We recorded adult dogs’ responses to distress cries from puppies and human babies, emitted from a loudspeaker in a basket. The frequency of the cries was presented in both their natural range and also shifted to match the other species. Crucially, regardless of species origin, calls falling into the dog call-frequency range elicited more attention. Thus, domestic dogs’ responses depended strongly on the frequency range. Females responded both faster and more strongly than males, potentially reflecting asymmetries in parental care investment. Our results suggest that, despite domestication leading to an increased overall responsiveness to human cues, dogs still respond considerably less to calls in the natural human infant range than puppy range. Dogs appear to use a fast but inaccurate decision-making process to determine their response to distress-like vocalisations.

Extraordinary Altruists Exhibit Enhanced Self–Other Overlap in Neural Responses to Distress

Shared neural representations during experienced and observed distress are hypothesized to reflect empathic neural simulation, which may support altruism. But the correspondence between real-world altruism and shared neural representations has not been directly tested, and empathy’s role in promoting altruism toward strangers has been questioned. Here, we show that individuals who have performed costly altruism (donating a kidney to a stranger; n = 25) exhibit greater self–other overlap than matched control participants ( n = 27) in neural representations of pain and threat (fearful anticipation) in anterior insula (AI) during an empathic-pain paradigm. Altruists exhibited greater self–other correspondence in pain-related activation in left AI, highlighting that group-level overlap was supported by individual-level associations between empathic pain and firsthand pain. Altruists exhibited enhanced functional coupling of left AI with left midinsula during empathic pain and threat. Results show that heightened neural instantiations of empathy correspond to real-world altruism and highlight limitations of self-report.

Extraordinary altruists exhibit enhanced self-other overlap in neural responses to distress

Shared neural representations during experienced and observed distress are hypothesized to reflect empathic neural simulation, which may support altruism. But the correspondence between real-world altruism and shared neural representations has not been directly tested, and empathy’s role in promoting altruism toward strangers has been questioned. Here we show that individuals who have performed costly altruism (donating a kidney to a stranger; n=25) exhibit greater self-other overlap than matched controls (n=27) in neural representations of pain and threat (fearful anticipation) in anterior insula (AI) in an empathic pain paradigm. Altruists exhibited greater self-other correspondence in pain-related activation in left AI, highlighting that group-level overlap was supported by individual-level associations between empathic pain and first-hand pain. Altruists exhibited enhanced functional coupling of left AI with left mid-insula during empathic pain and threat. Results show that heightened neural instantiations of empathy correspond to real-world altruism and highlight limitations of self-report.

Effect of prenatal Qi exercise on mother–infant interaction and behavioral state

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of prenatal Qi exercise on mother–infant interaction and the behavioral state of the infant. A prospective, quasi-experimental design was used in 70 healthy pregnant women of more than 18 weeks of gestation. Pregnant women in the intervention group received 90 minutes of prenatal Qi exercise twice a week for 12 weeks. Prenatal Qi exercise group’s Nursing Child Assessment of Feeding Scale scores was higher in mother’s sensitivity to cues, responses to distress, socioemotional growth fostering, and cognitive fostering and for children in responsiveness. There was no significant difference in Anderson Behavioral State Scoring System scores between groups. The results suggested that prenatal Qi exercise is a valuable approach to positively influence mother–infant interaction postdelivery.