Prosocial behaviors, behaviors that benefit others, are present in various forms across a range of species. While rats have been shown to exhibit multiple prosocial behaviors, few studies have investigated the influence of the social context on prosocial behavior or explored the micro behaviors that predict helping. The work in this dissertation employs a novel experimental environment to study how rats respond to each other’s “neediness,” change their behavior based on levels of familiarity, modify their helping depending on the stress in the environment, and reciprocate help (or not) across different social contexts.The introduction provides an overview of critical concepts related to prosocial behavior, discusses the effectiveness of using rat models to study these phenomena, and outlines the historical and current research on prosocial behavior in rats. It also identifies research gaps and sets the stage for the subsequent chapters' exploration of social behavior in rats. The first chapter investigates whether rats' willingness to release a trapped conspecific from an enclosure is influenced by the trapped rat's level of neediness, defined by the experimentally-imposed stressors and the rats’ expression of distress. Frame-by-frame video analysis revealed the complex interplay between the trapped rat's distress, the free rat's state, and the temporal dynamics of their behaviors in predicting helping behavior. The second chapter investigates whether familiarity, defined by the strain of the trapped rats, and neediness, defined by the experimentally-imposed stressors, influences rats’ propensity to release trapped conspecifics in a triadic helping environment. The final chapter goes through three separate experiments that explore how rats adapt their helping behavior based on the social context and their partners’ previous actions. The studies in this chapter provide evidence that rats respond to each other’s prior prosocial actions and change their reciprocal helping behaviors depending on the social context. Overall, through different behavioral tasks and the analysis of rats’ macro and micro behaviors, this dissertation provides insights into the social context-, experience-, and affective state-dependent prosocial behavior of rats.