Summary: Researchers uncover that the humble roundworm may hold insights into basic emotional mechanisms. When subjected to electric shocks, these worms displayed behavior consistent with a primitive form of emotion, prioritizing danger over food.
Leveraging genetic analysis, the study suggests that these reactions may be governed by an active genetic mechanism, shedding light on the roots of emotions found even in complex beings like humans. This foundational research could pave the way for new treatments for emotional disorders.
Key Facts:
- Roundworms exhibited behavior consistent with basic “emotions” when subjected to electrical shocks, including prioritizing escape over food.
- Genetic analysis revealed neuropeptides (akin to our hormones) play a role in regulating this “emotional” response, hinting at the possibility of an active genetic mechanism behind emotions.
- Discovering emotion-related genes in worms could offer potential targets for treatments of human emotional disorders, given the genetic similarities.
Source: Nagoya City University
Brain research is one of the most crucial fields in modern life sciences, and “emotion” is one of its major topics. Studying emotions in animals has long been considered challenging with limited research mostly focused on “fear” in mice and rats.
Since the 2010s, it has been increasingly reported in scientific papers that even crayfish and flies may have brain functions resembling emotions by focusing on several characteristics of their behavior, such as persistence and valence.
For instance, when an animal experiences a dangerous situation like being attacked by a predator (a negative valence) even for a short period, the animal’s behavior may be to stay in a safe place, ignoring normally attractive smells of food even if hungry, for a certain length of time (persistence), which a primitive form of emotion can regulate. However, the details of these fundamental “emotion mechanisms” remain largely undisclosed.
An international research team from Nagoya City University (Japan) and Mills College at Northeastern University (U.S.) has revealed the possibility that the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans possesses basic “emotions.” They used the worms because worms have been used for detailed analysis of basic functions such as perception, memory, and even decision-making at cellular and genetic levels.
The research has been published in GENETICS.
The team initially discovered that when worms are subjected to alternating current stimulation, worms start moving at an unexpectedly high speed. Interestingly, the team also found that this “running” response persisted for one to two minutes even after the electrical stimulation for a few seconds was terminated.
In animals in general, when a stimulus is stopped, the response to that stimulus usually ceases immediately. (Otherwise, the perception of stimuli such as sounds or visual scenes would linger.) Therefore, the reaction of “continuing to run even after the stimulus stops” is exceptional.
Furthermore, during and after the electric stimulation, the team found that the worms ignore their food bacteria, which provide crucial environmental information. This suggests that while the presence or absence of their food bacteria is usually crucial, the danger posed by electrical shocks, a survival-threatening stimulus, is even more important.
In other words, when worms sense the dangerous stimulus of an electrical shock, their highest survival priority is to escape from that location. To achieve this, the brain’s functioning seems to persistently change, including ignoring the usually significant “food” in order to escape danger. This suggests that the phenomenon of “worms continuing to run due to short-term electrical stimulation” reflects basic “emotions.”
Furthermore, through genetic analysis, particularly leveraging the advantages of worms, the team revealed that mutants unable to produce neuropeptides, equivalent to our hormones, exhibited a longer duration of continuous running in response to electrical stimulation compared to normal worms.
This result indicates that the continuous state in response to danger is regulated to end at the appropriate time. Indeed, if we experience excitement or fear that persists for a very long period, it disrupts our daily lives.
Therefore, the findings suggest that our emotions, such as “excitement,” “happiness,” or “sadness,” induced by stimuli, may not be naturally destined to fade away with time, but are controlled by an active mechanism involving genes.
This study demonstrates that using worms can offer detailed insights into the genetic mechanisms underlying primitive “emotions.” Many of the genes at work in worms are known to have counterparts in humans and other organisms, so studying worms can offer significant clues about the genes involved in the basis of “emotions.”
Specifically, conditions like depression, classified as mood disorders, can be interpreted as states where negative emotions are excessively and persistently maintained due to the inability to effectively process experienced stimuli. If novel genes related to emotions are discovered through worm research, these genes could potentially become targets for new treatments of emotional disorders.
About this emotion and evolutionary neuroscience research news
Author: Ling Fei Tee
Source: Nagoya City University
Contact: Ling Fei Tee – Nagoya City University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Electric shock causes a fleeing-like persistent behavioral response in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans” by Ling Fei Tee et al. Genetics
Abstract
Electric shock causes a fleeing-like persistent behavioral response in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegant
Behavioral persistency reflects internal brain states, which are the foundations of multiple brain functions. However, experimental paradigms enabling genetic analyses of behavioral persistency and its associated brain functions have been limited. Here, we report novel persistent behavioral responses caused by electric stimuli in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegant.
When the animals on bacterial food are stimulated by alternating current, their movement speed suddenly increases 2- to 3-fold, persisting for more than 1 minute even after a 5-second stimulation.
Genetic analyses reveal that voltage-gated channels in the neurons are required for the response, possibly as the sensors, and neuropeptide signaling regulates the duration of the persistent response. Additional behavioral analyses implicate that the animal’s response to electric shock is scalable and has a negative valence.
These properties, along with persistence, have been recently regarded as essential features of emotion, suggesting that C. elegans response to electric shock may reflect a form of emotion, akin to fear.
