Animal Experience

ISBN: 978-1-60785-xxx-x

edited by Leon Niemoczynski and Stephanie Theodorou

Department of Philosophy

Immaculata University

Malvern, Pennsylvania

United States

Introduction: Consciousness and Emotions in the Natural World

This “living” book about life explores the nature and meaning of the emotional lives of nonhuman animals, especially how those lives are communicated to other living creatures (such as human beings) via affective states. By examining the emotional lives of animals and how they are communicated, we hope to re-examine how human beings interact with, and relate to, other living creatures capable of experiencing emotional lives.

The property of emotion, in both human and nonhuman species, implies a level of internal conscious experience which supports and includes related cognitive activity. Insight into animal emotion can be useful in understanding the development of our common ancestral brain-mind, that cognitive activity in which affective changes in the nervous systems of animals registers communication/expression, recognition of individuals, and decision-making. These traits, in turn, suggest that most philosophically (and perhaps scientifically) traditional moral boundaries between humans and nonhuman animals may require serious rethinking. We therefore hope to address what impact a better understanding of the emotional lives of animals might have upon animal welfare and our deeply embedded beliefs concerning the nature of animal minds in general. (more...)

1. The Emotional Lives of Animals

Duncan Campbell

Podcast Interview with Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall – The Ten Trusts: Celebrating the Anima in All
Michael Tobias
A Review of Animal Minds: Awareness, Emotions and Heart by Marc Bekoff
Jaak Panksepp 
Affective consciousness in animals
Ram Vimal 
Attention and Emotion
Michael Mendl, Oliver H. P. Burman, and Elizabeth S. Paul 
An integrative and functional framework for the study of animal emotion and mood
Manisha Rai 
Monkey Business: Emotion and Consciousness in Primates

2. Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation: The Mental/Psychological Lives of Animals

Jaak Panksepp
Affective neuroscience of the emotional BrainMind: evolutionary perspectives and implications for understanding depression
Alexandra G. Rosati and Brian Hare 
Chimpanzees and Bonobos Exhibit Emotional Responses to Decision Outcomes
Thierry Steimer
Animal models of anxiety disorders in rats and mice: some conceptual issues
Joshua M. Plotnik, Frans B. M. de Waal, and Diana Reiss
Self-recognition in an Asian elephant
Barbara King - How Animals Grieve

3. Broadcasting Consciousness in Animals: Cognition and Communication

Marian Stamp Dawkins
Animal Minds and Animal Emotion
Marina Scheumann, Anna-Elisa Roser, Wiebke Konerding, Eva Bleich, Hans-Jürgen Hedrich and Elke Zimmermann
Vocal correlates of sender-identity and arousal in the isolation calls of domestic kitten (Felis silvestris catus)
Andrew J Tate, Hanno Fischer, Andrea E Leigh, and Keith M Kendrick
Behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for face identity and face emotion processing in animals

Attributions