Page 182 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

Chapter 8
orangutans were shown to yawn contagiously, but only in response to yawn videos of real orangutans. The avatar did not elicit more yawns, and there was no difference between yawns in response to familiar or unfamiliar orangutans. These results are interesting for several reasons: i) orangutans show contagious yawning despite their more semi-solitary nature (previously, contagious yawning was only found in highly social species (e.g., Norscia et al., 2020)), ii) the yawning avatar did not elicit more yawns, even though a previous study found a contagious yawning effect in response to a virtual representation of a chimpanzee (Campbell et al., 2009), and iii) familiarity did not modulate the occurrence of yawn contagion, even though this is expected if contagious yawning serves some social function or is linked to emotion contagion (Palagi et al., 2020). Overall, the findings of Chapters 5 and 6 indicated that orangutans, despite being classified as the least-social great ape, are susceptible to yawn and self-scratch contagion.
Finally, in Chapter 7, I elaborate on a fully pictorial version of the Implicit Association Test (PIAT) that we created to eventually test implicit attitudes in great apes (Figure 1iii). The PIAT was designed to be intuitive and require minimal instructions (as the apes cannot be instructed). In this study, we validated the PIAT in children and adults and compared how it performed in relation to the classic IAT using words in an online study with mainly university students. Participants were tested on their implicit attitudes towards individuals of Dutch or Moroccan descent (Figure 1a, b). We chose these specific categories because a race bias is one of the most established IAT effects, thus testing for it was useful for examining the validity of the PIAT. We established that a pictorial version of the IAT can tap into the same implicit attitudes as the original word-IAT in human adults and children. Though we have not yet had the opportunity to test its utility in great apes, I hope that others may find the PIAT useful for inter-species or inter-cultural research.
Theoretical implications
The results in this dissertation converge to two main conclusions. Firstly, the mechanisms underlying attention for emotions as well as automatic, spontaneous mimicry are likely to be conserved ancestral traits among the hominids. Secondly, species-specific characteristics such as their evolutionary and social environment dramatically shape how these mechanisms are expressed.
Survival and reproduction of a species are driven by adaptive mechanisms that underlie individuals’ behavior and cognition (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Attention for emotions as well as spontaneous mimicry of behaviors may be two adaptations
180