Page 190 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms
P. 190

                                Chapter 8
The results in this dissertation indicate a shared evolutionary origin for emotion- biased attention and spontaneous mimicry in at least the hominids. Importantly, familiarity and similarity may affect how attentional and behavioral mechanisms drive emotion perception, and these “modulators” can themselves be affected by species-specific characteristics such as sociality. The work I describe in my dissertation has raised new, important questions that need addressing in future research. At this moment, we do not fully understand which emotional expressions are the most salient or relevant to specific species (Kret et al., 2020). Furthermore, to elucidate a link between yawn and self-scratch contagion and emotion contagion, we require more work involving different animal species and more direct ways of testing the link (Massen & Gallup, 2017). Finally, establishing how great apes view emotions in terms of valence and arousal is important not only for our fundamental understanding of emotion perception but also for questions relating to animal welfare (Adriaense et al., 2020). Thus, I hope that this dissertation provides a stepping stone towards more research on emotions in our closest living relatives, but also other animals.
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