Abstract
In recent years there has been a growing research interest in the field of animal emotion. But there is still little agreement about whether and how the word “emotion” should be defined for use in the context of non-human species. Here, we make a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive definitions. Descriptive definitions delineate the ways in which the word emotion is used in everyday life. Prescriptive definitions are used to pick out the set of events that scientific theories of emotion purport to explain. Picking out three prescriptive definitions, we show that the different ways in which emotions are defined correspond to processes that are distributed differentially across the animal kingdom. We propose that these definitions provide a useful starting point for investigating the varying emotional capacities of a wide range of animals, providing a basis for a new, comparative science of emotion.
Highlights
Whether and to what extent different animals experience emotions of one kind or another is an important scientific question; it is one that to date has proven extremely difficult to answer
No one of these definitions is superior to the others; we argue that they are all valuable in illustrating the layers of processing that comprise human emotional processing, components of which are likely to be present to differing degrees in different species across the animal kingdom
Anderson and Adolphs (2014) provide good evidence that particular insect species demonstrate some fundamental features of emotional processing, prompting further research questions regarding the extent to which these features are analogous to or homologous with those features that occur in human emotional processing.Their identification of these phylogenetically early “emotion primitives” prompt further questions about the extent to which other species, and other invertebrates, demonstrate these features, as well as the questions of whether all these features necessarily occur together, and whether the presence of emotion primitives can tell us anything about the capacity of such species to suffer or have poor welfare (Sherwin, 2001)
Summary
Whether and to what extent different animals experience emotions of one kind or another is an important scientific question; it is one that to date has proven extremely difficult to answer. The extent to which different species share facets of the emotional processes identified in humans is a question for comparative psychology and neuroscience. We go on to consider in detail three prescriptive definitions of emotion Each of these contemporary definitions has been designed to delineate the types of processing that should be considered “emotional”, and each has the potential for drawing a different line between species that can and cannot be considered to have the capacity for emotions. No one of these definitions is superior to the others; we argue that they are all valuable in illustrating the layers of processing that comprise human emotional processing, components of which are likely to be present to differing degrees in different species across the animal kingdom
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