Reflection: Lick Your Rat

After completing the Lick Your Rat activity (or watching the video), please answer the following questions in your own words (meaning, do not use direct quotes from the book). Be sure to include terminology and concepts from the readings in your response to the 2nd prompt.

• In approximately 100 words, please share your thoughts about the YouTube video and reading/watching the supplemental page from University of Utah on Lick Your Rat experiment.
• The rat nurturing example in the reading and activity show us how parental behavior can shape the behavior of offspring on a biochemical level. In approximately 200 words, please explore how this relates to humans and include the personal and social implications.

Reflection: Lick Your Rat Answer 

As the speaker in the video said, epigenetics is the “study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way the genes normally work” (CDC, 2020). According to the study on rats licking their babies, it was found that the offspring of a mother rat that was licked when they were babies tend to grow up calmer, less aggressive with lesser abnormal sexual tendencies, compare to the babies from a mother rat who does not lick their babies (Lotsu, 2017).