[2] After that, he moved to the University of Parma where he was part of the team that discovered auditory mirror neurons[3][4] in the frontal cortex of the macaque monkey.

In 2004, Keysers and collaborator Gazzola opened the Social Brain Lab at the University of Groningen where they provided evidence for abnormal activity in somatosensory, motor and limbic brain structures in patients with abnormal empathy [1][8] [9] and that rats experience distress when they witnessed another animal in distress.

This showed that rats can experience emotional contagion, a predecessor of empathy[10] In 2010, Keysers moved to the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) where he is currently a department head and leads the Social Brain Lab[permanent dead link‍] together with neuroscientist Valeria Gazzola.

His team uncovered a mechanism responsible for emotional contagion by showing that rats have neurons in the cingulate cortex, a region involved in nociception, that respond both when a rat experiences pain and when it witnesses another animal experience pain, providing the first systematic evidence for the presence of emotional mirror neurons in the mammalian brain.

He is a recipient of the Marie Curie Excellence Award and is a member of the Academia Europaea and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.