Page 179 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

associations in primates and other animals (Figure 1iii). In this final chapter, I will focus on integrating the key findings from each chapter and discuss the implications of the results. At the end of the dissertation, I will point towards new and unanswered questions that can help us move forward in understanding the continuity between human and animal emotions.
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 investigated its underlying
implicit mechanisms or cognitive markers. The focus of this dissertation lies on (i) attention, (ii) mimicry, and (iii)
implicit associations. Moreover, I investigated the effects of species (a), familiarity (b), and context (c) on these
markers across six chapters (grey circles) in this dissertation. 8
Summary of key findings
In Chapter 2, I compared an attentional bias for emotions (Figure 1i) between bonobos and humans and examined whether this bias is affected by familiarity with or the species of the expressor (Figure 1a, b) across a series of three experiments using the dot-probe task. In Experiment 1, bonobos were presented with emotional and neutral scenes of familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics, and we found that the attention of bonobos was automatically tuned to emotions of unfamiliar conspecifics. In Experiment 2, we examined whether this emotion-biased attention in bonobos also occurred when bonobos were exposed to human facial expressions of emotions,
General discussion
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