Positive affective contagion in bumblebees

Affective contagion, a core component of empathy, has been widely characterized in social vertebrates, but its existence in any invertebrate is unknown. Using a cognitive bias paradigm we demonstrate positive affective contagion in bumblebees. After being trained on colored flowers with different reinforcements, bees that interacted with a conspecific in a positive affective state were quicker and more likely than controls to land on ambiguous colored flowers, indicating the transfer of a positive judgement bias between bees. Additional observations and experiments showed that affect could be transmitted between bees without physical contact, i.e., through visual modality alone. Our findings suggest that affective contagion may be an evolutionarily widespread mechanism present in both social vertebrates and social insects.
, , , # Positive emotional contagion in bumblebees

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.pnvx0k6x9](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.pnvx0k6x9)

This dataset contains all the raw training and testing data used for the statistical analyses and visualisation in the main text.

## training.csv:

This file contains data from the training phase of the latency-based go/no-go judgement bias task.

'beeID' entries are the unique identification numbers for each individual bee used in each experiment, coded by integer;

'colony' entries are the unique identification numbers for each colony, coded by letter (A, B, C, ...);

'experiment' entries are the experimental groups (e.g. individual control, individual reward, social control, social reward, etc.);

'colorpositive' entries are the rewarding color used, with 1 = blue, and 2 = green;

'trial' entries are the training trial numbers (integer, starts at 1);

'latency' values are the time taken (in seconds) for a bee to land on a stimulus. Note that maximum laten...,