In 1998, Jaak Panksepp proposed that all mammalian species are equipped with brains capable of generating emotional experiences. Subsequent work examined studies on rodents to provide foundational support for this claim. One of these studies examined whether rats would work to alleviate the distress of a conspecific. Rats were trained to press a lever to avoid the delivery of an electric shock, signaled by a visual cue, to a conspecific. They were then tested in a situation in which either a conspecific or a Styrofoam block was hoisted into the air and could be lowered by pressing a lever. Rats that had previous experience with conspecific distress demonstrated greater than ten-fold more responses to lower a distressed conspecific compared to rats in the control group, while those who had never experienced conspecific distress expressed greater than three-fold more responses to lower a distressed conspecific relative to the control group. This suggests that rats will actively work to reduce the distress of a conspecific, a phenomenon related to empathy. Comparable results have also been found in similar experiments designed for monkeys.