Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923 ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Issue: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience What is an animal emotion? Frans B.M. de Waal Living Links, Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and Psychology Department, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia Address for correspondence: Frans B.M. de Waal, Ph.D., Living Links, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University, 954 N. Gatewood Road Atlanta, GA 30322.
[email protected] Emotions suffuse much of the language employed by students of animal behavior—from “social bonding” to “alarm calls”— yet are carefully avoided as an explicit topic in scientific discourse. Given the increasing interest in human emotional intelligence and the explicit attention in neuroscience to the emotions, both human and nonhuman, the taboo that has reigned for so long in animal behavior research seems outdated. The present review seeks to recall the history of our field in which emotions and instincts were mentioned in the same breath and in which neither psychologists nor biologists felt that animal emotions were off limits. One of the tenets supporting a renewed interest in this topic is to avoid unanswerable questions and to view emotions as mental and bodily states that potentiate behavior appropriate to environmental challenges. Understanding the emotionally deep structure of behavior will be the next frontier in the study of animal behavior. Keywords: evolution; animal cognition; empathy; facial expressions; instinct Emotions used to be an uncontroversial part of any ior to attribute it to an emotion if our only ev- description of animal behavior, as uncontroversial idence of the emotion is the very behaviour the as the instincts with which they were compared emotion is supposed to explain.” Since the 1970s, and equated.