Author Archives: leigh wallace

Critical thinking, opposable thumbs, and cell phones are one of the many things that differentiate us from animals in the wild and nature. A common belief is that emotions are one of those things but certain studies say otherwise. Emotions, like fear, anger, and anxious, are examples of emotions believed to be exclusive to human behavior and animals with similar brain anatomies like other mammals that share similarities in their brain physiology and chemistry. Despite it being well-known that other mammals can display certain human-like emotions, we still don’t know if non-mammal animals such as bees, insects, and fish have similar ’emotions’.
Researchers backed by Newcastle University did an experiment where they submitted bees to an anxiety-producing environment by vigorous shaking their enclosure. The experiment was designed to replica a predatory attack to see if the bees displayed negative patterns of deviation in judgement. By using these patterns of deviation in judgement as a measure of emotions in the bees, the bees would be considered exhibiting emotions due to the results.

“A bee enters a cylinder with an ambiguous reward in the study of bee “feelings.” – Clint J. Perry

Another experiment was done to see if crayfish would display anxiety-like emotions like mammals do when given chemical injections of serotonin. The results were that the crayfish displayed a form of anxiety that shared similarities with complex human-like emotions present in many vertebrates.

Lastly, a study was done in 2015 by Brian Key at the University of Queensland to see why fish do not feel pain as humans do. The experimenter used a bio-engineering principle that structure determines function. He located the area of the human brain that is responsible for a person feeling pain and mapped out the structure features and shape of that part of the brain. He then compared the identified structures to a fish brain to see if the fish was anatomically capable of feeling pain. The results were that the fish lacked the necessary brain structures to feel pain therefore fish can not feel pain at least in the same way humans do.

Emotions, despite there being clear-cut definitions produced by various science communities, are still very loosely defined in respects to the general public. Regardless of what the general public, non-science specialists, and even certain scientists say, I along with most other scientists who have conducted these studies believe more studies need to be done and new ways to examine emotions in animals need to be developed in order to further analyze the possibility that these ‘wild’ animals display emotions like humans do. Our current understanding of the functionality and anatomy of other animals’ brains and even the understanding of own brain functionality and anatomy are not complete so that means we can’t many definite statements regarding the question of whether animals have the same complex emotions that humans do.