Page 15 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

understanding them will allow scientists to determine whether the behaviors that we 1 intuitively deem indicators of emotions in animals are indeed mediated by the same
or homologous mechanisms shared between humans and other animals (Panksepp,
2011). Additionally, this will also allow us to reconstruct how our human ancestors
may have behaved and felt.
The focus of this dissertation lies on how emotions are perceived by studying
three markers of emotion perception: attention, spontaneous mimicry, and implicit associations (Figure 1i-iii). In this dissertation, emotional modulation of attention and mimicry is compared between humans, bonobos, and orangutans, and an adaptation to an existing paradigm to study implicit associations is validated for potential use in comparative science in the future. As will become clear, attention, mimicry, and implicit associations are building blocks that are fundamental to social cognition. Moreover, they provide an opportunity to study what emotions mean to other animals and make direct comparisons between species possible. The goal of the dissertation is twofold, namely to better understand the evolutionary continuity of emotion perception across hominids, but also to study the uniquely derived differences in emotion perception in the three species (Figure 1a). To do this, the
Figure 1. Schematic overview of the research topic. Emotion perception is a multifaceted phenomenon that is governed by many different cognitive mechanisms. Often, these mechanisms operate on an implicit level; automatically and unconsciously. To study emotion perception across species, I investigate its underlying implicit mechanisms or cognitive markers. The focus of this dissertation lies on (i) attention, (ii) mimicry, and (iii) implicit associations. Moreover, I investigate the effects of species (a), familiarity (b), and context (c) on these markers across six chapters (grey circles) in this dissertation.
The mechanisms of emotion perception
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