Monkey See, Monkey Do: Contagious Itch in Nonhuman Primates

Authors

  • Ashley N. Feneran
  • Russell O'Donnell
  • Ashley Press
  • Gil Yosipovitch
  • Mark Cline
  • Greg Dugan
  • Alexandru D.P. Papoiu
  • Leigh A. Nattkemper
  • Yiong Huak Chan
  • Carol A. Shively

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2340/00015555-1406

Keywords:

contagious, scratching, itch, macaque, video, model, pruritus.

Abstract

“Contagious itch” has been anecdotally reported and recently confirmed in a controlled setting in humans. Here, we investigated in adult rhesus macaques whether “contagious itch” occurs spontaneously in monkeys. In a first experiment, the latency to scratch following cage-mate scratching was observed in pair-housed adult rhesus macaques. Scratching increased within the first 60 s and subsequently declined. In a second experiment, scratching behavior was recorded for individually caged adult rhesus macaques which where shown videos of monkeys scratching, but also neutral stimuli. A greater frequency of scratching was observed when monkeys viewed a video sequence of another monkey scratching as well as during the neutral stimulus immediately following the monkey scratching segment. In conclusion, viewing other monkeys scratching significantly increased scratching behavior in adult rhesus macaques.

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Published

2012-06-07

How to Cite

Feneran, A. N., O’Donnell, R., Press, A., Yosipovitch, G., Cline, M., Dugan, G., … Shively, C. A. (2012). Monkey See, Monkey Do: Contagious Itch in Nonhuman Primates. Acta Dermato-Venereologica, 93(1), 27–29. https://doi.org/10.2340/00015555-1406

Issue

Vol. 93 No. 1 (2013)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2012 Ashley N. Feneran, Russell O'Donnell, Ashley Press, Gil Yosipovitch, Mark Cline, Greg Dugan, Alexandru D.P. Papoiu, Leigh A. Nattkemper, Yiong Huak Chan, Carol A. Shively

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

All digitalized ActaDV contents is available freely online. The Society for Publication of Acta Dermato-Venereologica owns the copyright for all material published until volume 88 (2008) and as from volume 89 (2009) the journal has been published fully Open Access, meaning the authors retain copyright to their work.

Unless otherwise specified, all Open Access articles are published under CC-BY-NC licences, allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for non-commercial purposes, provided proper attribution to the original work.

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