I start with the observation that chimpanzees are intelligent, social animals with complicated social lives – but without language. So body language – including here both the audible vocalisation and the visible expression of emotions and feelings – is very important for them, having nothing else. And a lot of this body language has survived in us humans, despite our acquisition of language. I note in passing that there has been some debate about whether the inability of chimpanzees to talk is down to something being wrong with their brains or to something being wrong with their vocal tract, debate which is not relevant here. What is relevant is that chimpanzees do not talk, despite the large amount of time and treasure that has been spent on trying to train them so to do – although they can do some vocal communication and a very small number of them have been trained to sign – at least after a fashion – words more than sentences.
It is also relevant that chimpanzees have similar facial apparatus to that of humans and are able to use their faces in similarly expressive way. An option not available to, for example, fishes.
There may be some connection with the importance animals with good sight – such as many vertebrates – attach to the eyes and to the direction of gaze of others. An animal meeting the eyes of a conspecific needs to be able to sort out whether the gaze of the other is friendly or unfriendly. Friend or foe? Stay or go? With this attention to the eyes perhaps spreading to attention to the rest of the face – which would explain the importance of the brows over the eyes in facial expressions – attested to by reference 6.
In what follows I mostly gloss both the audible vocalisation and the visible expression of emotions and feelings under the phrase facial expression.
According to de Waal, emotions drive actions and feelings, with emotions being more physiological, feelings being more subjective. So while he tries to keep clear of the feelings chimpanzees might have, he does try to measure and compare emotions. I am not sure that I am very comfortable with this dichotomy, nor even that it is widely adopted by others, but it will serve for present purposes.
One of his examples was the fact that when male chimpanzees and male humans are angry, they sometimes inflate their lips, an expression which he calls elsewhere the ‘bulging lips face’. De Waal says that he has never seen this expression in female humans, even when they are very angry. Trying to check, Google failed to turn up much material about this particular expression, but I did get to reference 3 and from there to one Paul Ekman with references 4 and 5. Which last gave us the snap above with its man with lips bulging in anger.
Ekman also talks of basic emotions, a term which he takes some time and trouble to define, with one of their defining features being that they are shared between primates and humans. He enumerates 15 of them: amusement, anger, contempt, contentment, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, guilt, pride in achievement, relief, sadness/distress, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, and shame. He specifically excludes what he calls other affective phenomena like guilt, love and hate. In this he rather moved away from the popular scheme whereby emotions are mapped into a two dimensional space, perhaps onto a circle, with his two dimensions having been pleasant-unpleasant and active-passive.
There are, no doubt, debates about how exactly the young learn to make these facial expressions, is it genetic or is it learned, but I dare say at least part of it is imitation, with young humans at least being very keen on imitating their elders and betters. And there are, no doubt, debates about how exactly imitation in general goes; the route from stimulation of the retina to the complex sequence of muscle firing commands needed to execute the imitation. Debates which I do not pursue here.
According to Ekman, the big driver of the evolution of emotions was communication with conspecifics, which fits well with learning by imitation. With one puzzle being the adaptiveness – or not – of visibly showing fear, fear being included with the 15 basics above, with there being merit in sharing fear with friends but not with enemies.
At reference 7, Preston and de Waal talk about another important phenomenon, empathy. With empathy being one vehicle, one process, which, in the absence of words, allows one human to communicate an emotion to another. Emotions are very contagious and empathy is a convenient term under which hide away all the messy detail about imitation alluded to above. Perhaps about how we have it both that emotion drives the facial expression – and that imitating the facial expression can drive the emotion.
So perhaps what de Waal was driving at in the present talk, and in his work more generally, was that emotions in chimpanzees have the same roots and have lot in common with emotions in humans. Indeed, Ekman, as noted above, goes so far as to define a basic emotion in humans, in part, by its presence in primates. So given that we can observe emotions in chimpanzees uncluttered by complicated interactions with language, maybe observing chimpanzees will teach us something about ourselves. In any event, he went through some interesting examples.
Human-like things that chimpanzees do
Or perhaps we should say, given that the chimpanzees came first, chimpanzee-like things that humans do.
Chimpanzees do disgust. Their faces clearly show that they prefer their food to be fresh and clean. Various experiments have been done pitting disgust against hunger.
Chimpanzees have a sense of humour and do fun. They have something which approximates to a laugh.
Condolence. Chimpanzees will console each other for loss, for example of a child.
Reconciliation. Male chimpanzees from the same group will often, usually even, go through a process of reconciliation after a fight. Rather as husband and wife after a row, or infant and mother after a tantrum.
Chimpanzees have a sense of fairness, a sense which seems to be stronger in the more dominant individuals. And mothers are fair in their allocations to their children, and those children expect to be fairly treated. Tellingly, this sense of fairness does not take body size into account; a chimpanzee does not recognise that big animals need more food than small animals. At the same time, chimpanzees are also into cheating and trickery.
Lots of animals can do impulse control. For example, a cat’s instinct when it sees a mouse is to try and grab it. But an experienced and intelligent cat will be able to wait for a long time, for the right time to pounce on a mouse, a more successful strategy in the long run.
Active suicide is not known in chimpanzees. But there are some passive suicides by not eating. And chimpanzees do sometimes die after a death in the family.
Miscellaneous
We often talk about getting cold feet about something. Talk which, it seems, has a physiological basis, with getting cold feet being a consequence of anxiety or fear, mediated by contraction of the appropriate blood vessels. The idea seems to be to conserve energy against unpleasant eventualities. There are other locutions of this sort – for example hair standing on end – and one is, from time to time, reminded of their physiological origins.
There is some evidence that chimpanzees can suffer from mental disorders like autism, but not enough to be sure. In any event, there is lots of variation in behaviour between individuals. They all have their own personalities. From where I associated to Amundsen noting, half way to the South Pole, that his sledge dogs had preferences, had their friends and enemies.
Chimpanzees are strong, violent and unpredictable animals, so humans need to have a care when working with them. There is a lot of intra-group violence, never mind extra-group violence, including a lot of deaths – a lot of which are infanticide – and some cannibalism. So de Waal’s colleague’s visit to a dying female chimpanzee whom he had known for many years, in her night cage, was unusual and not without risk. A visit which is the subject of a popular item in YouTube and which is described in the book at reference 9.
Living in groups drives all kinds of interesting behaviour. But we should not get carried away: the pretty clouds in which starlings are apt to fly and the pretty shoals in which some fishes are apt to swim, for example, are nothing to do with anything as grand as emotions. They can be explained away by much simpler, lower level mechanisms; albeit mechanisms which involve perception and action, the perception action model of reference 7.
We were reminded that when de Waal started out the behaviourists still ruled the world and it was difficult to make a career out of monkey emotions and emotion related behaviour. That has all changed and it is more or less common ground that our behaviour is grounded in the behaviour of monkeys. And that plenty of other animals, much more distantly related to us, do some of the same sorts of things.
A summary on emotions, faces, voices and actions
Emotions are states of being which came about through a need to communicate with other members of the group about the basic facts of life and living.
So, certainly in the beginning, the emotions of hominids – orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, humans and their extinct relatives – were expressed in vocalisations and facial expressions. Helped along by excellent eyes, reasonable hearing, sophisticated facial muscles and a sophisticated vocal apparatus. Rather like reflexes, a more or less automatic and unconscious reaction to perception of salient events.
The same features helped along the drive to imitate, resulting, inter alia in empathy. Imitation which was, to use a computing analogy, more software than hardware and so much more flexible.
But over time, as brains got bigger and better, we learned to suppress the expression of emotions, should that be appropriate. For example, not good for the cat to try to grab the mouse the instant he sees it; not usually good for the human to express fear in the face of a dangerous opponent or assailant. This suppression is rarely perfect and there is usually, for example, some leakage of the micro-expressions which Ekman talks of on his website (reference 5) and elsewhere.
And humans acquired language, which made things considerably more complicated.
Conclusions
An entertaining talk which has started all kinds of hares. And while I do not have the answer to the question advertised by the title – What can animal emotions teach us about ourselves? – I have learned that it is an interesting question.
I have also learned that the processing which generates action from emotions is layered. There is a primitive, near hard-wired sort of response for each sort of emotion, but then on top of that is a learned response. We can and do learn to suppress these primitive responses, suppression which does not usually completely block, for example, the appearance of the micro-expressions which Ekman builds some of his systems on – as do professional poker players.
And in chasing these hares, it has struck me that maybe ethologists try too hard to find an evolutionary or fitness explanation for everything. It may well be that in building complex animals, evolution often settles for a simple rule which works well enough, enough of the time, but which clearly breaks down at the margins. I associate to taxation in a complex world, where there is a clear trade-off between keeping the rules simple and manageable and getting the right result – in equity or morality – for everyone. And to buying a word processing package: Word from Microsoft might not do quite what you want, but it is certainly not worth going out and getting your own Word built to order. Far too expensive.
References
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-coming-of-veggies.html.
Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/monkey-life.html.
Reference 3: Influence of social context on the use of blended and graded facial displays in chimpanzees – Parr LA, Cohen M, de Waal FBM. – 2005.
Reference 4: Basic Emotions - Paul Ekman – 1999. In T. Dalgleish and M. Power (Eds.). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Sussex, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1999.
Reference 5: https://www.paulekman.com/. Ekman, on retirement, founded a business on deciphering facial impressions, teaching his clients to read faces, in particular to detect lying and deception. So, for example, for $299, you get basic access to all the tools needed to read micro expressions plus tools to help you respond to the emotions you detect in other people for a year. The source of the illustration to this post.
Reference 6: About brows: emotional and conversational signals - Ekman, P. - 1979. In Human ethology: Claims and Limits of a New Discipline, (ed. M. von Cranach, K. Foppa, W. Lepenies, and D. Ploog), pp. 169–248. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. I have not been able to turn up a free copy of this paper, but it does seem that small movements of the brows can be very revealing about the emotional state of their owner. And Abebooks can do the business for a very reasonable price.
Reference 7: Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases - Stephanie D. Preston and Frans B. M. de Waal – 2003.
Reference 8: https://www.chimpworlds.com/chimpanzee-evolution/. Bing turned up this handy summary of hominid evolution – with hominids being orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans. Plus their now extinct relatives.
Reference 9: Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves – Frans De Waal – 2019.
Reference 10: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/08/mamas-last-hug-frans-de-waal-review. A review of same in the Guardian, a review which I missed first time around.
Reference 11: The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals - Charles Darwin – 1872. Apparently a rather neglected work. But maybe I will give it a try!
Reference 12: Death among primates: a critical review of non‐human primate interactions towards their dead and dying – André Gonçalves, Susana Carvalho – 2019. Not particularly relevant, but an interesting, recent paper which turned up in the margins.
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