Understanding why some individuals are resilient to adversity could facilitate the development of treatments for conditions linked to traumatic events. Mondoloni et al. now show that mice that witness another animal’s distress develop resilience to subsequent threats, and uncover the underlying circuit mechanisms of this effect.

The authors showed that control mice subjected to a series of footshocks exhibited increased immobility in a tail suspension test (considered a depressive-like behaviour). However, this effect was absent in mice that had previously experienced ‘negative emotional contagion’ (NEC) resulting from the observation of a cage mate receiving a rapid footshock experience.