The concept of prosocial behavior encompasses actions that promote the well-being of others, often motivated by emotional connections and empathy within a group. This behavior is also observed in non-human species, including rodents, frequently studied in neuroscience research. A previous study proposed the releasing of a trapped conspecific as a task to study prosocial behavior in laboratory rats. Nevertheless, the empathetic/prosocial motivation to liberate the trapped rat is controversial. In this study, we used a similar protocol to evaluate behavioral factors that may influence the performance of the conspecific release task (CRT). Adult female Wistar rats were submitted to the CRT conducted in an open field arena. An acrylic restrain box, in which a conspecific was trapped, was placed in the center of the arena. In Experiment 1, the rats were evaluated in six CRT trials, and the occurrence of the liberating behavior (opening trapping box) varied among subjects. We established a criterion for categorizing the opening behavior: the free rats that performed the CRT in 2 sessions or more were categorized into “opener” and the rats that performed the behavior one time, or never performed the CRT were categorized as “non-openers”. After separating the groups, behavioral parameters that possibly influenced CRT performance were compared between openers and non-openers. At the end of experiment 1, anxiety-like behavior was observed in animals belonging to the non-opener group, as expressed by diminished exploration of the center of the arena. In experiment 2 we applied pharmacological manipulation to modulate the anxiety-like behavior of the free rat, evaluating the effects of these variations on the liberating behavior. The rats that were categorized as non-openers were treated with the classical anxiolytic diazepam and the free rats categorized as openers received fluoxetine, that is anxiogenic when given acutely. Treatments were applied before the day of the test to evaluate performance in CRT. Non-openers treated with diazepam freed their cage mates, whereas openers treated with fluoxetine did not. The data suggests that anxiety-like levels influence CRT behavior.
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