A latest study has suggested that feelings of empathy aren’t unique to human beings. The Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center’s researchers have found that prairie voles console the ones they love when they seem distressed.

Prairie voles are tiny rodents famous for creating lifelong, monogamous bonds and sharing parental care of their little ones.

To carry out the study, the researchers temporarily separated prairie voles from some of their closest relatives and gave them mild shocks.

On reuniting the voles, they discovered that the non-stressed individuals instantly comforted the stressed voles by licking and grooming them. As per the release, it turned out that the well known ‘love hormone’ oxytocin plays a vital role in this behavior.

Consolation behaviors have been observed in nonhuman, social species, including dogs, elephants and dolphins. But this is the first study to prove the existence of such behaviors in rodents.

In the release, study co-author Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, explained, “Scientists have been reluctant to attribute empathy to animals, often assuming selfish motives. These explanations have never worked well for consolation behavior, however, which is why this study is so important”.

The researchers have discovered that when a vole saw another individual usually a familiar vole distressed it activated the anterior cingulate cortex of the animal, which is the part of the brain that also starts functioning when humans see somebody in pain.

The prairie voles responded by boosting their pro-social contact, and when they did so, it also clearly decreased the other's anxiety. But, when researchers stopped oxytocin signaling particularly in the anterior cingulate cortex of prairie voles, the animals didn’t console distressed ones anymore.

The research has given scientists an opportunity to explore the neural mechanisms of this formerly unidentified consolation behavior in laboratory animals.