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Photo Source: pexels, how many emotions have we ignored that have not been expressed?

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Do the seemingly small and simple creatures such as butterflies and bees in the flowers, ants that we can trample on, mosquitoes that can be slapped in one slap, and cockroaches that can't be driven away from the house have emotions?

Lack of expression does not mean that it did not exist before the 1980s. Many times, doctors operated on babies without anesthesia. Sometimes they just injected them with muscle relaxants to prevent them from resisting during the operation. During the whole operation, the baby is awake, and they can clearly feel all the pain during the operation.

Such a seemingly "cruel" operation actually stems from ignorance at that time. At that time, it was generally believed in medicine that human babies had no sense of pain and that all their crying and other behaviors were conditioned without emotion. "babies are thought to be subhuman organisms that produce 'random sounds' and do not feel pain. Scientists have conducted zigzag experiments with acupuncture, cold water, hot water and head restraint to prove that babies do not feel anything." Frans Deval (Frans De Waal), emeritus professor of primate behavior at Emory University University, describes the perception of babies before the 1980s in his book the Last hug: emotions between Animals and humans (Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves).

Photo Source: pixabay's "verbal ability" is usually an important sign that we humans distinguish ourselves from all other animals. But sometimes we seem to give excessive superiority to "verbal ability", so that we think that only what is expressed through language is called emotion. Babies can't express or speak, so people used to think that babies have no emotion or feeling. The same is true of animals, and they are even less likely to speak human words, so human beings have long denied that animals have any emotions.

Nowadays, however, anyone who has seriously raised cats and dogs will probably not agree with this view. When we spend a long time with pets, we can obviously feel the emotions of cat owners or dogs. Jane Goodall once described a grief-stricken chimpanzee who lost his mother, who was unable to give up and eventually died. Darwin pointed out in his book the expression of feelings between humans and Animals (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) that human emotions are not sudden, but animal emotions are constantly developed in the process of evolution. In recent decades, through a variety of long-term and meticulous observations and experiments, scientists have found that animals may have far more emotions and feelings than we think. Many examples of emotions have been found in primates similar to us, to most mammals, to fish, and even invertebrate crustaceans.

Deval: "whenever I read that someone authoritatively declares that animals have no intentions and emotions, I want to ask, 'hasn't this man ever had a dog?'" (photo Source: pixabay) insects seem to be the most misunderstood of the many animals that have been mistaken for emotionless. Even today, most people may think that bugs "don't deserve" emotions-their behaviors, like babies in the last century, are just emotionless, simple nerve reflexes. However, more and more studies have found that the emotions of insects may be richer than we think.

Insects: happy, scared and pessimistic. In a study published in the journal Current Biology late last year, a group of bumblebees in the lab liked to play with toys. Their toys are simple-a few small wooden balls, but the bumblebees have a lot of fun, they put their legs on the small wooden balls, flap their wings to provide power, and then, like acrobats, several legs work together to roll the wooden balls.

They will step on these small wooden balls to make all kinds of complex movements. One of the bumblebees seemed particularly fond of playing this way, rolling small wooden balls 44 times a day.

The different tracks of these bumblebees rolling out on small wooden balls were recorded in the lab. (Dona et al, 2022) scientists have designed rigorous experiments to prove that the "ball-playing behavior" of these bumblebees is really playing, a spontaneous hedonistic behavior in a relaxed state, not to get food, not to remove foreign objects, not to mate, nor is it a stereotyped behavior caused by stress. (if you are interested in the specific research process, you can read the original paper.)

So can they really feel happy through this kind of play? The answer may be yes.

When we human beings feel happy and happy, we sometimes feel that the whole world is sweet; after experiencing unhappiness, we sometimes feel that the whole world is dark. And some studies have shown that bees do the same. In an experiment with bees, the researchers showed bees two different odors and associated them with reward and punishment, respectively. The researchers then shook some of the bees on machines (to mimic being attacked by predators), making the bees "in a bad mood". Then, all the bees were shown several new odors in which the two odors were mixed in different proportions (so that the bees were not sure whether they corresponded to reward or punishment), and observed the reaction of the bees. The results showed that wobbly "bad mood" bees were more likely to think of these ambiguous smells as related to punishment rather than reward.

Bees who are "in a bad mood" may take a pessimistic view of neutral things. (Bateson et al, 2011) in a similar experiment, the researchers fed some individuals in a group of bumblebees a liquid containing sugar (to make them happy), and then similarly, the researchers also gave some ambiguous options, while the "happy" bumblebees were more likely to think that these neutral options were related to reward rather than punishment.

These two experiments may show that bees and bumblebees make optimistic or pessimistic judgments about neutral things because of their different moods. More importantly, in both experiments, levels of hormones such as dopamine decreased in "bad mood" bees, while dopamine levels increased in "happy" bumblebees. This hormonal change related to mood is very similar to us humans.

From this point of view, those bumblebees who play small wooden balls may be really happy.

And this kind of emotional research is not limited to bees and bumblebees. In fruit fly studies, scientists have found that fruit flies exhibit a depression-like state in the face of negative effects beyond their control, and feel afraid of unknown intruders. In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), brain scientist Andrew B. Barron and philosopher Colin Klein concluded that although insects do not have the same cerebral cortex as humans, they have enough brains to give them subjective feelings.

Different emotions, different personalities? The conclusion that insects can also have subjective feelings undoubtedly challenges the common sense of many contemporary people. In the perception of many people, insects may be like a pile of simple copy-and-paste code that only "set" responses to specific stimuli. However, bugs may have their own feelings and emotions, which may also mean that even different bugs of the same species may be unique to each other, or even have their own different personalities.

In a study published in the journal Behavioural Process in 2018, researchers found that some of the same species were more introverted and some were extroverted. Introverted katydids prefer to stay in a place where they feel safe, rather than go out to explore new things and environments, and are frightened to be motionless whenever the wind blows around. On the other hand, extroverted katydids prefer to go out and dare to explore unknown things. They can recover quickly even if they are frightened, and they will not be too scared to move for a long time. These characters such as "social fear" or "social cattle" cause katydids, which clearly belong to the same species, to adopt different predation strategies, and there are significant differences in predation success rates.

Katydids also have "social cattle" and "social fears" (photo: juan-CC BY-SA 2.0) similar personality differences are not uncommon in insects, and in many social insects, such as ants, different individuals living together have different personalities. The same is true of cockroaches at home. Some cockroaches prefer to hide, some prefer to go out, and there may be great differences between different cockroaches. A study of cockroaches has proved that the prosperity of cockroach populations benefits from the personality differences of cockroaches in the group, and some individual cockroaches even play a key role in cockroach group decision-making (collective decision).

But it must be emphasized that there is no clear relationship between insect personality and their emotions and perceptions, and we still have a long way to go to understand insect emotions. After all, humans have not yet studied their own emotions thoroughly, so it is even more difficult to study the emotions of other species. In an article published in Science last year, Professor Deval said: "emotions are very private states of consciousness and are difficult to observe publicly, so it is difficult to conduct scientific research."

And even we humans sometimes ignore the inner emotions of the people around us; at the same time, sometimes we tend to hide our emotions from others. Find that a person's emotions need patience, need to feel and think attentively, need to communicate carefully, and find that animal emotions are even more so.

For a long time in the past, we were so used to looking at animals only from a human point of view that it was naturally difficult to detect the emotions of animals. In recent years, scientists have begun to try a variety of ways to listen to the hearts of animals from the point of view of animals, only to find that the hearts of these animals are not as monotonous as we think.

Reference link:

Https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo2378

Https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347222002366

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Https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1520084113

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Https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635720300218

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Frans Deval (De Waal, Frans) Frans De Waal. (2022.) Last hug: animal and Human emotion / Hunan Science and Technology Press.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: global Science (ID:huanqiukexue)

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