• Question: Do animals feel emotions we feel like depression, anger and grief?

    Asked by anon-188826 to Pizza Ka Yee, Paul, Nadine, Alex on 14 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Reid

      Alex Reid answered on 14 Nov 2018:


      Hi Matthew J, great question. I am not an animal researcher but I can provide some limited insight into your question. The answer is yes, but it can depend on the animal. Most mammals, and indeed many vertebrates (animals with a backbone), will be able to experience basic emotions similar to ours such as fear, pain and pleasure. It is hard for psychologists to determine the absolute similarity between our own emotions and those of animals as we can’t really ask them, but we can take a very well educated guess based on their behavior and other clues. This is why animals such as rats, dogs and cats, are sometimes used in research: they provide an approximate model of humans in certain contexts. For example, a few decades ago researchers induced a type of ‘doggy depression’ in dogs by giving them repeated electric shocks via an electric floor the dogs could not get away from. To be clear hate the idea of that experiment (I love dogs) but it did show us dogs with ‘learned helplessness’ could display depression-like symptoms. If an animal is annoyed it will typically make it’s feelings known however grief is a more complex emotion to determine. Animals such as wales and elephants have shown behavior in the wild that looks very much like grief and mourning. It’s not the most cheerful video but if you want to see an elephant grieving check out this clip: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/elephants-mourning-video-animal-grief/ As humans are very much part of, not separate, from the animal kingdom so it makes sense that some of the emotions we have that help us survive will also be present in other species.

    • Photo: Pizza Ka Yee Chow

      Pizza Ka Yee Chow answered on 15 Nov 2018:


      Hello Matthew J,

      The short answer to your question is a YES. Current research in animals’ emotion have provided evidence for depression – we can use a task called as ‘cognitive bias assessment’ to examine an individual’s emotion. This assessment is not only applied in the research interests of cognition (i.e. whether happy individuals learn quicker in a task than unhappy individuals), but is also applied in animal welfare (i.e. making sure individuals that are living in a farm or laboratory are happy).

      As Alex has pointed out, many findings have shown that mammals do show depression and pain. Current research has also provided some evidence for invertebrates like bees (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23831810-200-bees-arent-just-smart-theyre-sensitive-too/) and (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3158593/). Regarding grief, some research is done with non-human primates and show that chimps do grief. However, more investigations in other animals are needed in order to know whether they also show similar grieving process as well as grieving state as human do.

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