A pioneering neuroscience project led by idpIN co-coordinator Cristina Márquez, and DYNABrain leader, at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology, University of Coimbra, has been awarded nearly €1 million by the la Caixa Foundation’s CaixaResearch Health Call 2025. The project, titled “Decoding the brain mechanisms behind empathy and prosocial behaviour”, aims to unravel how our brains perceive and respond to others’ emotions, a critical foundation for social interaction, decision-making, and mental health.
Understanding Empathy at the Circuit Level
Social interactions shape much of our lives. Yet, despite its importance, how the brain processes social information, especially rewarding emotional states in others, remains poorly understood. Cristina Márquez and her team will use advanced methods to study how the brain encodes, transmits, and acts on emotional information observed in others.
The project builds on pioneering behavioral tests developed in rats that have already shown that when rats observe their peers experiencing reward, their brains display neural signatures associated with reward. Now, the research will explore how brain circuits talk to each other to translate what is perceived into prosocial behavior.
Cutting-Edge Tools for a Complex Problem
To achieve their goals, the team will deploy a powerful set of neuroscience techniques, including:
- Circuit mapping to identify which brain regions interact during empathy-related tasks.
- Neuronal manipulation (e.g., optogenetics or chemogenetics) to test the causal role of specific brain pathways.
- High-resolution recording to capture the dynamics of neural activity in real time.
By dissecting these mechanisms, the researchers hope to reveal how the brain balances internal reward signals with socially relevant information, shedding light on how we decide to “help” or “care” for someone else.
Implications for Mental Health
Beyond fundamental science, the project has important clinical potential. Understanding how the neural bases of empathy work could pave the way for novel interventions in psychiatric conditions where social behavior is disrupted, such as autism spectrum disorders or depression.
By identifying specific circuits or signaling mechanisms, future therapies might more precisely target the neurobiology of social dysfunction, a promising step toward treatments that go beyond symptom management.
A Strong Collaborative Team
The project is a collaboration between Cristina Márquez’s group and Alexandre Charlet at the Institut de Neurosciences Cellulaires et Intégratives (CNRS, Strasbourg), bringing international expertise to the study of emotion and social cognition.
The total budget awarded is €999,930, underlining the confidence of CaixaResearch in the scientific rigor and potential impact of the work.
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