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Summary: Empathy, crucial for social interaction, is impaired across various neuropsychiatric conditions. However, the genetic and neural underpinnings of empathy variability remain elusive. By combining forward genetic mapping with transcriptome analysis, we discover that aryl hydrocarbon receptor nuclear translocator 2 (ARNT2) is a key driver modulating observational fear, a basic form of affective empathy. Disrupted ARNT2 expression in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) reduces affect sharing in mice. Specifically, selective ARNT2 ablation in somatostatin (SST)-expressing interneurons leads to decreased pyramidal cell excitability, increased spontaneous firing, aberrant Ca2+ dynamics, and disrupted theta oscillations in the ACC, resulting in reduced vicarious freezing. We further demonstrate that ARNT2-expressing SST interneurons govern affective state discrimination, uncovering a potential mechanism by which ARNT2 polymorphisms associate with emotion recognition in humans. Our findings advance our understanding of the molecular mechanism controlling empathic capacity and highlight the neural substrates underlying social affective dysfunctions in psychiatric disorders.

Background: Some COVID-19 testing centres have reported manipulated test numbers for antigen tests/rapid tests. This study compares statistical approaches with traditional fraud detection methods. The extent of agreement between traditional and statistical methods was analysed, as well as the extent to which statistical approaches can identify additional cases of potential fraud., Methods: Outlier detection marking a high number of tests, modeling of the positivity rate (Poisson Regression), deviation from distributional assumptions regarding the first digit (Benford's Law) and the last digit of the number of reported tests. The basis of the analyses were billing data (April 2021 to August 2022) from 907 testing centres in a German city., Results: The positive agreement between the conventional and statistical approaches ('sensitivity') was between 8.6% and 24.7%, the negative agreement ('specificity') was between 91.3% and 94.6%. The proportion of potentially fraudulent testing centres additionally identified by statistical approaches was between 7.0% and 8.7%. The combination of at least two statistical methods resulted in an optimal detection rate of test centres with previously undetected initial suspicion., Conclusions: The statistical approaches were more effective and systematic in identifying potentially fraudulent testing centres than the conventional methods. Testing centres should be urged to map paradata (e.g. timestamps of testing) in future pandemics., Competing Interests: Conflicts of interest The authors state that there is no conflict of interest., (© Robert Koch Institute. All rights reserved unless explicitly granted.)