It was long assumed that nonhuman animals don’t have emotions, or that their emotions are qualitatively different from human emotions. However, increasing research into animal behaviour, cognition and emotions has shown that assumption to be false. Many animals – at least all vertebrates – have basic emotions. Behavioural and cognitive research of animals sorely needs to be complemented by emotion science. For that to be possible, there is a need for further development of methods to measure animal emotions.
As knowledge about nonhuman cognitive and emotional processes accumulates, it puts the presumed human uniqueness into a new perspective. Similarly, the relationships of humans with other species amongst us need to be re-evaluated. Human-animal interactions are increasingly studied from multidisciplinary perspectives. In our project, we ask how people recognize and interpret animal emotions. Studies thus far suggest that people are poor at recognizing animal emotions, which has implications e.g. in all contexts where animal welfare depends on human actions, or safety of humans depends on the correct interpretation of animal behaviour.
Rapid recognition of emotions in conspecific individuals is crucial for humans and other social species. Additionally, cross-species recognition is evolutionarily beneficial as it can provide crucial information e.g. danger or resources. In modern humans, the ability to recognise non-human species’ emotions is particularly central to the welfare of the animals in our care.
However, the factors that affect a person's ability to recognise animal emotions are still largely unclear. Several factors may influence cross-species emotion recognition. They may be related to external effects such as culture and experience, personal factors including gender, age, personality, or empathy and to the assessed animal, its behaviour and surroundings. Identification of such effects is crucial for it provides tools for education and improving animal welfare.
In this study, we will investigate people's ability to recognize animal emotions through short videos using two different variables. Emotion can be divided into two variables: valence, ranging from positive to negative, and arousal, ranging from low to high. By assessing these separately, we can pinpoint the factors that influence people's ability to recognize emotions very precisely.
In the first section, we collaborated with the Korkeasaari Zoo. The second part will launch in October 2024, and we will soon provide information on how to participate.
Infrared thermography, also known as thermal imaging, is a technology for measuring distributions of surface temperatures at a distance. Several practical applications have already been developed to improve health and welfare of humans and other animals. For example, in human and veterinary medicine thermographic methods are already in use to find suspected sites of local inflammation and nerve damage.
We conduct fundamental research that is needed as ground work to enable development of methods to measure surface temperature changes relating to animal emotions. Before measurement is possible, considerable research effort is still needed to reliably distinguish emotion-linked effects in surface temperature from environmental temperature effects; to explore under which conditions emotion-linked temperature effects become masked by thermoregulation of the body; and to investigate how these effects may differ between species.
Ultimately, measuring animal emotions with thermography has the potential to improve animal welfare in zoos and other facilities, by providing additional information on how the animals are, helping to detect and remedy problems, and to test whether improvements in animals' living conditions have worked as intended.