Animal Emotions: an Overview of Current Research

Emotions in non-human animals have attracted increasing interest over the past three decades. This interest goes hand in hand with an increased concern for animal welfare. More fundamentally, comparative studies investigating which animals experience what types of emotions are crucial to understanding animal behaviors as well as human brain functioning. In this paper, we offer an overview of emotions observed in vertebrates, focusing more particularly on mammals and birds in which emotions are most studied. After describing the expression of emotions considered primary in different species, we show that so-called secondary emotions can also be observed in some animals, because they help regulate social relationships. The main methods for studying emotions in animals are discussed through examples. We conclude with the need to further investigate positive emotions and social emotions, in species belonging to various taxa, and we emphasize that while anthropomorphism represents a pitfall well known to researchers, its opposite, anthropodenial, can lead to underestimating the complexity of the mental life of animals.