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Empathic birds

21.05.2019

To effectively navigate the social world, we need information about each other’s emotions. Emotional contagion has been suggested to facilitate such information transmission, constituting a basic building block of empathy that could also be present in non-human animals. Most animal studies have faced difficulties in measuring the emotional valence in contagion.

A collaboration between cognitive biologists and social neuroscientists at University of Vienna solves this problem by integrating behavioral and psychological methods. They show that ravens observing a conspecific in a negative emotional state subsequently perform in a pessimistic manner on a judgment task. The results of this study have been published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. [read more]

Adriaense, J.E.C., Martin, J.S., Schiestl, M., Lamm, C. & Bugnyar, T.: Negative emotional contagion and cognitive bias in common ravens (Corvus corax). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, DOI: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1817066116 

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