Document type : News item from Futura Sciences
Author: Nathalie Mayer
Preview: What is the difference between an emotion and a feeling? Scientists say there is one. Joy, sadness, anger and fear are emotions. They are instantaneous, short-lived and non-rational physiological reactions to a situation. All this is going on in the part of our brain known as the amygdala. It's this small area tucked away in our limbic brain - the brain's oldest part, the place where our emotions happen - that commands the release of hormones in response to a stimulus. Then our body starts to respond. On seeing a spider, for example, it may recoil or scream.
Feelings, on the other hand, are unique to each of us. They are built on the basis of our mental representations, they can endure over time and they are overwhelmingly associated with a complex process that occurs in the cortex. The grey matter. This is the region of the brain where functions such as memory, reasoning, language and consciousness operate. Hence it is here that anger, which is indeed an emotion, can, if repressed, be transformed into hatred, which is a feeling.
We then have to ask whether animals are capable of experiencing feelings? This is a major issue that is much discussed by the scientific community. And it has to be said that researchers have been arguing about emotions for over forty years. Nowadays, ethologists describe the emotions as having three components. First, there is the physiological component, which determines how the body reacts to a stimulus. Then there is the behavioural component, which provides the means to express emotions. Last, there is a cognitive component that leads the animal to make particular choices. This framework allows researchers to show that many animal species experience emotions. Physiological measurements - such as heart rate - or behavioural observations - such as the position of the ears or the posture of the tail - can provide scientists with information on this point. There is evidence, for example, that elephants feel sadness when faced with the loss of one of their own. Dogs feel joy when their human comes home after a day's work.
Awareness of self and others - the key issue
Where feelings are concerned, matters are more complicated. For they are by definition to a certain extent the subjective interpretation of emotions. They arise from the fact that we have the capacity to identify the causes and effects of emotions. For researchers who study humans, it is possible to ask questions - albeit with the risk of obtaining only answers that are either socially acceptable or plain wrong, given that it is not always easy to recognise our own feelings well. But animals are not able to answer.
There is a possibility that the key to feelings lies primarily in a capacity for self-awareness. Or, even more, in the capacity to put oneself in the place of another. This hypothesis is supported by certain ethologists. Some animals are now known to be aware of their own bodies. They are also known to imitate and interpret the emotions of others, to share their desires and even to understand their beliefs. Yes, you read that right. The experiment in question was carried out on great apes, who are of course our close cousins, but it was conclusive. The apes showed themselves capable of understanding even false beliefs, in this case, the expectation of a human that an object would be in the last place they had seen it, despite the fact that the apes had seen the object being moved elsewhere.
To discover both whether and how animals subjectively interpret their emotions, transforming them into feelings, it will be necessary for researchers to conduct further studies. These would involve a multi-methodological approach combining, for example, behavioural and cognitive observations with neurophysiological and hormonal data. In the meantime, ethologists suggest that we should assume until proven otherwise that animals do indeed have feelings, if only to improve how we respond to their needs.
