• Question: Do you believe that mamals and other higher animals can feel complex emotions like jealousy and grief?

    Asked by katherinegauld to Anne, Carolyn, Joe, Mariana, Nick on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joseph Devlin

      Joseph Devlin answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      I’m not sure what’s complex about jealousy or grief — they both seem pretty basic to me — but yes, I think that some animals probably experience these emotions. It’s impossible to tell without asking them, of course, but animals that raise their young for an extended period of time, often appear to ‘grieve’ if the baby dies. And my dog definitely experiences jealousy whenever anyone in the family gives attention to another dog!

    • Photo: Mariana Vargas

      Mariana Vargas answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      Although I don’t study this in my research, I do think that animals like mammals and birds can feel grief and jealously by looking at their behavour. There is some great footage in documentaries (such as David Attenborough’s Life of Mammals) showing this.

    • Photo: Nick Bradshaw

      Nick Bradshaw answered on 16 Mar 2010:

      I think that they are capable of feeling these emotions (after all I have seen my wife’s cat sulk when I’m not paying her attention – which to me sounds like jealousy), however I don’t think they experience them in as complex a manner as we do, and certainly don’t understand them in the same way.

    • Photo: Carolyn McGettigan

      Carolyn McGettigan answered on 17 Mar 2010:

      I think Anne is probably the best person to answer this one!

      I think there is considerable evidence of basic emotions (e.g. fear) in a range of mammals including other primates. Non-human primates can definitely engage in all sorts of quite complex social behaviours too. However, from my reading it seems there might be much less convincing evidence of more complex *emotional* processing, for example emotions that require a theory of mind (being able to attribute mental states to other individuals). One of the main problems seems to be finding the right method with which to test the hypotheses in order to disentangle behaviour that might really be based on the attribution of mental states from that based on nothing more than very sensitive perceptual processing of others’ behaviour. This is tricky when non-human primates lack language.

      In everyday life, people often have a very keen sense that their family pet exhibits a range of often complex emotions, such as jealousy. Some researchers claim to have observed grief in chimpanzees, and there are compelling observational accounts. I just don’t know enough about the subject, but I think at least with household pets that it’s possible that the often human-like animal ’emotions’ described by owners could be relatively basic reactions to behavioural cues from the owner – I read about a study suggesting this might be the case for ‘guilty’ facial expressions in dogs.

    • Photo: Anne Seawright

      Anne Seawright answered on 18 Mar 2010:

      Tough question and the answer is we don’t really know. Some mammals obviously do, such as humans, others I am not so sure about and even if they do it will not be the same thing as the “jealousy” or “grief” that we feel because they are so complex and involve lots of other emotions and cognitive abilities such as the theory of mind – ie having an understanding of others’ emotions. Theory of mind is a difficult thing to prove animals have due to their lack of language and at the moment it is something that we cannot prove…. although that doesn’t mean they dont.
      The problem is that many people attribute human emotions to animals with no evidence which can cause problems for both people in understanding animals and then for the animals themselves. For example the dog who toilets in the house and has been shouted at by its owner before for the same thing is said by the owner to look guilty when in actual fact the dog is showing appeasement signals to say to its owner please don’t harm me because it is fearful of its owner telling it off. This then often leads owners to believe their pets know right from wrong which again would require theory of mind and a complex understanding of ethics…. and so often leads to more punishment and eventually damages the owner pet relationship.

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