Fear can be vicariously acquired from social observation of a conspecific’s distress. This observational fear requires the ability to recognize emotions and feelings of others, i.e. empathy. Although direct fear experience is important source of fear learning, learning through observation of other’s suffering is also effective. The neuronal circuits involved in classical fear learning are well documented, but studies on the circuits for observational fear learning are just at the beginning stage. In this talk, I will try to introduce our studies related to social, vicarious learning in the mouse. In addition recent efforts on searching for genes involved in control of observational fear learning will be discussed.