Investigation of the role of paracetamol in empathy-related behavior in rats

Empathy, which is to understand and internalize the motivation of someone else's feelings, situation or behavior, is an important skill in the survival and reproduction of mammals, which are social beings. The sense of empathy needed to keep communities and the whole humanity together plays an important role in our coherent social life. Empathy is also very important for the survival of the human race; if empathy is blocked, various forms of tension such as war, terror, violence, fighting and conflict, which are caused by interpersonal and intra-community tensions, are emerging. Empathy has a wide range of forms from the simple forms of unconscious emergence that is feeling the same feelings as imitating the facial expressions, movements, to the other forms is consciously emerging in which a response is formed by understanding and interpreting the state. Both forms of empathy were found to be used in rats, primates, and humans. The brain regions associated with empathy are the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, the temporal lobe in the hippocampus, the cingulate gyrus; the most important neurotransmitters associated with empathy are oxytocin and arginine vasopressin. It is known that the release of oxytocin and vasopressin from the presynaptic region has a regulatory role for the cannabinoid 1 (CB1) receptor located in this presynaptic region. Recently published survey study, it was observed that paracetamol influenced empathy. There is no information on the mechanism of this effect of paracetamol in studies where paracetamol-using participants had low empathy scores. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects and mechanisms of parasetamol on empathy that most commonly used in the world, modulate pain via CB1 receptors in brain. Keywords: Empathy, paracetamol, oxytocin, vasopressin, prefrontal cortex, amygdalae.