Abstract
Copyright: © 2012 Gaspar A. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Once, not so long ago lets go back two decades Primatology was a much more rigid discipline, in which the studies of nonhuman primate facial expression and emotion were bound to connect both topics in the form of (stereotyped displays) which researchers actively sought in their behavior sampling schemes. There was little room for interindividual variation, cultural variation and complex emotions, which were «naturally» in the realm of humans. In recent years not only has there been an upsurge of interest in nonhuman primate expressive behavior, including facial and gestural expression, but also an increased interest in the detailed inspection of complex emotional experiences, such as empathy and social emotions, and a widespread acknowledgment of personality, which can affect all of the above. How did Primatology depart from dogma and arrived at current fairness to the emotional and expressive lives of primates and where is this trend going to take us?
Highlights
Another century and a half backwards, in the late XIXth century, Charles Darwin, who was not prone to dogma and was an accurate observer of both human and animal behavior, had marveled at the expressiveness of primates at the London Zoo: In (The expression of Emotions in Man and Animals) [1] he launched the view that expressive movements had undergone evolutionary processes, drawing many human-nonhuman primate comparisons
In the early 1990’s, enter James King, professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona, consultant with the ChimpanZoo program of the Jane Goodall Institute and naturally an attentive ape observer, pursuing since the early 1990s a valid measure of ape personality: with Aurelio Figueiredo [13], he published what became the first study of the structure of personality in an ape species that could be compared to the structure of human personality
In the early 2000’s personality was being reported as affecting many classes of ape behavior, including facial expression, which varied extensively, according to group/population, and across individuals of the same age-class and sex [16,17,18]
Summary
Another century and a half backwards, in the late XIXth century, Charles Darwin, who was not prone to dogma and was an accurate observer of both human and animal behavior, had marveled at the expressiveness of primates at the London Zoo: In (The expression of Emotions in Man and Animals) [1] he launched the view that expressive movements had undergone evolutionary processes, drawing many human-nonhuman primate comparisons. In the early 1990’s, enter James King, professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona, consultant with the ChimpanZoo program of the Jane Goodall Institute and naturally an attentive ape observer, pursuing since the early 1990s a valid measure of ape personality: with Aurelio Figueiredo [13], he published what became the first study of the structure of personality in an ape species that could be compared to the structure of human personality.
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