20.04.2021 Jessie E.C. Adriaense

Our social lives and the success of our interactions often depend on sharing the same mindset with others. For instance, sharing the other’s feelings and understanding them (i.e. empathy) may facilitate prosocial behavior, and having shared goals and intentions may aid in collaborative acts (i.e. joint action). From an evolutionary perspective, it was long assumed that empathy was restricted to mammalian species, and joint action and its shared intentionality mechanism are generally suggested to be uniquely human. Yet, observations and recent empirical work in other animal taxa puts these notions into question. Still, measuring these psychological mechanisms, such as shared emotions or shared intentions, is notoriously difficult in animals, which is partially driven by several conceptual and empirical ambiguities. In this talk I will mainly present my PhD research, with a focus on animal empathy and its emotional basis, and I will further present how this research extends to my post-doc work, involving joint action in primates.

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