Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

352 CHAPTER 8 Motivation and EmotionCRITICAL THINKINGEmotion in Nonhuman Animals: Laughing Rats, Silly Elephants, and Smiling Dolphins?Do animals experience emotions? If you’ve ever frolicked with aplayful puppy or shared the contagious contentment of a catpurring in your lap, the answer seems obvious. But before youaccept that answer, remember that emotion involves three components:physiological arousal, behavioral expression, and subjectiveexperience. In many animals, fear and other “emotional”responses appear to involve physiological and brain processesthat are similar to those involved in human emotional experience.In mammals, it’s also easy to observe behavioral responseswhen an animal is menaced by a predator or the anger inaggressive displays. But what about subjective experience?Darwin on Animal EmotionsCharles Darwin never doubted that animals experience emotions.In his landmark work The Expression of the Emotions inMan and Animals, Darwin (1872) contended that differences inemotional experience between nonhuman animals and humansare a matter of degree, not kind. “The lower animals, like man,Foxes in Love? Rather than living in a pack like coyotesor wolves, their evolutionary relatives, red foxes form amonogamous pair bond and often mate for life. Theylive, play, and hunt together and share in the care oftheir offspring. It’s tempting, but unscientific, to labeltheir bond as “love.”Laughing Rats? Rats are sociable, playful creatures. They emitdistinct, high-pitched chirps when they play, anticipate treats,and during positive social interactions. They also chirp whenthey’re tickled by researchers like neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp(2000, 2007a). But when infant rats are separated from theirmothers, or when they’re cold, they emit a distress cry that ismuch lower in frequency than the ultrasonic chirps that areassociated with pleasant experiences.manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery,” hewrote in The Descent of Man in 1871. From Darwin’s perspective,the capacity to experience emotion is yet another evolvedtrait that humans share with lower animals (Bekoff, 2007).Not all psychologists agree with that stance. Staunch behavioristslike Mark Blumberg and his colleagues (2000) argue thatthere is no need to assume that the behaviors of animals havean emotional or mental component. For example, they contendthat the distress cry of infant rats is not the expression of anemotional state. Rather, the cries are an “acoustic by-product”of a physiological process, more like a cough or a sneeze than ahuman cry (Blumberg & Sokoloff, 2001).One problem in establishing whether animals experience emotionis the difficulty of determining the nature of an animal’s subjectiveexperience. Even Darwin (1871) readily acknowledgedthis problem, writing, “Who can say what cows feel, when theysurround and stare intently on a dying or dead companion?”Which Is the “True” Smile? Psychologistand emotion researcher PaulEkman demonstrates the differencebetween a fake smile (left) and thetrue smile (right). If you were able topick out the true smile, it was becauseyou, like most people, are ableto decipher the subtle differences inthe facial muscles, especially aroundthe eyes and lips.Of course, humans are the animals thatexhibit the greatest range of facial expressions.Psychologist Paul Ekman has studiedthe facial expression of emotions formore than four decades. Ekman (1980)estimates that the human face is capable ofcreating more than 7,000 different expressions.This enormous flexibility allows usconsiderable versatility in expressing emotionin all its subtle variations.To study facial expressions, Ekman andhis colleague Walter Friesen (1978) codeddifferent facial expressions by painstakingly