Page 189 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

allows for direct comparisons between different populations and species. As such, the PIAT could potentially measure the strength of associations between emotional scenes and their valence or arousal level.
Indeed, the IAT has been successfully used to establish for instance cultural differences in implicit attitudes towards emotion regulation (Deng et al., 2019), approach and avoidance of fearful expressions (Hammer & Marsh, 2015), attitudes towards emotional expressivity (Cameron & Zeman, 2019), and stereotypical associations between certain emotional expressions (e.g., anger) and ethnicity (Bijlstra et al., 2014). Recently, one study directly investigated implicit attitudes towards emotions in adolescence with and without high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Emotional stimuli consisted of the six basic emotion expressions (i.e., happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, and surprise) and neutral expressions. The emotional expressions also varied in intensity. In this IAT, emotional stimuli were paired with words that were positive (e.g., peace, success) or negative (e.g., war, failure). Results indicated that individuals with high-functioning ASD showed larger IAT-effects (i.e., stronger positive or negative associations with the different emotional images) than individuals without ASD, indicating that it is possible to probe implicit attitudes towards emotions in humans. For a comparative study involving e.g., great apes, the words would have to be replaced by images of objects or individuals that great apes would associate with positivity or negativity, e.g., a veterinarian or a tranquillizer gun (see e.g., Allritz et al. (2015)).
Conclusion
In this dissertation, I set out to probe the emotional landscape of our closest relatives, 8 the great apes. This type of research can help us progress our understanding of the
evolution of emotional capacities in our species as well as other animals. Unfortunately,
the population of all wild-living great apes is dwindling, and all great ape species
now face extinction. As a consequence, the unique window into our evolutionary past is slowly but surely disappearing. Motivated by this pressing issue, I investigated the similarities and differences in emotion perception in bonobos, orangutans, and humans. Specifically, I investigated attentional and behavioral mechanisms that underlie emotion perception, which has been suggested to lay at the foundation of higher cognitive processes such as empathy (e.g., De Waal & Preston, 2017).
General discussion
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