Animal eMotion, or the emotional evaluation of moving animals

ABSTRACT

Responding adequately to the behaviour of human and non-human animals in our environment has been crucial for our survival. This is also reflected in our exceptional capacity to detect and interpret biological motion signals. However, even though our emotions have specifically emerged as automatic adaptive responses to such vital stimuli, few studies investigated the influence of biological motion on emotional evaluations. Here, we test how the motion of animals affects emotional judgements by contrasting static animal images and videos. We investigated this question (1) in non-fearful observers across many different animals, and (2) in observers afraid of particular animals across four types of animals, including the feared ones. In line with previous studies, we find an idiosyncratic pattern of evoked emotions across different types of animals. These emotions can be explained to different extents by regression models based on relevant predictor variables (e.g. familiarity, dangerousness). Additionally, our findings show a boosting effect of motion on emotional evaluations across all animals, with an additional increase in (negative) emotions for moving feared animals (except snakes). We discuss implications of our results for experimental and clinical research and applications, highlighting the importance of experiments with dynamic and ecologically valid stimuli.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal perception
• emotion
• specific phobia
• motion

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Caroline Wanza and Darius Dietrich for stimulus screening and data collection, Judith Kanehl and Christopher Landau for additional data collection, as well as Katherine R. Storrs for going through the tedious task of making her guinea pig Robinson walk on a straight path.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data and example stimuli are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6598920.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 450096725 awarded to AH.