Physiological state matching in a pair bonded poison frog

More than a century ago, Charles Darwin hypothesized that the empathy-like phenotype is a phylogenetically widespread phenomenon. This idea remains contentious, due to the challenges of empirically examining emotions, and few investigations among non-mammalian vertebrates. We provide support for Darwin’s hypothesis by discovering partial evidence for the most ancestral form of empathy, emotional contagion (i.e., matching another individual’s emotional state), in the pair bonding mimetic poison frog, Ranitomeya imitator. We found that male corticosterone, a physiological biomarker of stress, positively correlates with female partners in experimental and semi-natural conditions. This does not appear to coincide with behavioral state-matching. However, it is specific to female partners relative to familiar female non-partners, and is independent of effects that commonly confound studies on emotional contagion. Furthermore, this physiological state-matching is irrespective of partnership lo..., , , # Title of Project: Physiological state matching in a pair bonded poison frog

Access preprint version at bioRxiv at: [https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.25.509360.  ](https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.25.509360.)

The following raw datasets have been uploaded: 1-Empathy.txt, 2-CORTcorr.txt and 3-bhs.txt

###  Descriptions of datasets:

***1- ‘Empathy’***: the concentration of corticosterone of every individual and information related to their experimental condition (i.e. partner/non-partner, stress/non-stress, baseline/treatment/housing tank).

* *Date_Plate*: The date on which the ELISA hormonal plate was run (dd.mm.yy)
* *Plate:* The number of the ELISA plate that the sample was on
* *Date*: The date of hormone data collection (mm.dd.yy)
* *Date2:* The date of hormone data collection (dd.mm.yy)
* *Sex:* the sex of focal individual
* *ID*: the ID of the focal individual
* *CoupleID*: the ID of the focal individual's partner/non-partner female
* *Condition*: the experiment...