Mama's Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions

None of this occurs in bonobos, which is why these apes are often considered sexually “liberated.”

Blushing is highly communicative yet involuntary. Even tears can be faked more easily than a blush.

f shame were truly a uniquely human emotion without evolutionary antecedents, then shouldn’t humans express it quite differently from animals?

Notice the different language applied to humans and animals, though. We’ve already seen this with pride, the word used for humans, versus dominance in other species. Similarly, a person who gets into trouble with others or loses a contest is said to be ashamed, whereas a chimp under the same circumstances is merely submissive or acting like a subordinate. We prefer functional terms for animals, whereas for ourselves we focus on the feelings behind behavior. We are reluctant to imply that animals may have the same feelings or any feelings at all.

Are there also emotions concerned with the future?

All three emotions—gratitude, revenge, and forgiveness—sustain social relationships based on years of interaction among individuals, sometimes going back to when they played together as youngsters.

Conflict resolution is part and parcel of social life.

The final emotion concerning past events is forgiveness. Having studied primate reconciliation all my life, I have seen many times how chimpanzees kiss and embrace their former adversaries, how monkeys groom them, and how bonobos resolve social tensions with a little sex. This kind of behavior is not at all limited to primates: hundreds of reports find it in other social mammals and in birds, so much so that if anyone were to claim that a given species doesn’t make up after fights, we’d be baffled.

In apes, signs of gratitude may be more obvious. Two chimps had been shut out of their shelter during a rainstorm. Wolfgang Köhler, the German pioneer of tool use studies, happened to walk by and found both apes soaking wet, shivering in the rain. He opened the door for them. Instead of hurrying past him to enter the dry area, however, the chimps hugged the professor in a frenzy of satisfaction.6

Similar accounts exist of netted or beached dolphins and whales that human divers cut loose from nets or pushed back into the ocean. The cetaceans returned to their rescuers and nudged them or lifted them half out of the water before swimming away. In all cases, the humans present, deeply moved, viewed these interactions as signs of gratitude.