ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2017
The neural basis of understanding the expression of the emotions in man and animals.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neurobiological Signatures of Dyadic Transmission of Fear Extinction in Adolescent Trauma Exposure and Posttraumatic Stress.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Investigating the capabilities of large vision language models in dog emotion recognition.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Cracking the Valence Code: Patterned Facial Kinematics and Neural Signatures of Emotional Expressions in Mice.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Development and validation of a face database for the recognition of facial expressions of basic emotions in the Brazilian population.Psicologia, reflexao e critica : revista semestral do Departamento de Psicologia da UFRGS · 2024Article
- Empathy enhances decoding accuracy of human neurophysiological responses to emotional facial expressions of humans and dogs.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- The non-human animal reading the mind in the eyes test (NARMET): A new measure for the assessment of social cognition.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Matters of development and experience: Evaluation of dog and human emotional expressions by children and adults.PloS one · 2023Article
- Neuroimaging of human and non-human animal emotion and affect in the context of social relationships.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
- At the Neural Intersection Between Language and Emotion.Affective science · 2021Review
- When animals cry: The effect of adding tears to animal expressions on human judgment.PloS one · 2021Article
- The recognition of 18 facial-bodily expressions across nine cultures.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2020Article
- Somatostatin interneurons in the prefrontal cortex control affective state discrimination in mice.Nature neuroscience · 2020Article
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- The neuroscience of understanding the emotions of others.Neuroscience letters · 2019Review
- Article
- Seeing More Than Human: Autism and Anthropomorphic Theory of Mind.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Review
- From faces to prosocial behavior: cues, tools, and mechanisms.Current directions in psychological science · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Humans cannot help but attribute human emotions to non-human animals. Although such attributions are often regarded as gratuitous anthropomorphisms and held apart from the attributions humans make about each other's internal states, they may be the product of a general mechanism for flexibly interpreting adaptive behavior. To examine this, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans to compare the neural mechanisms associated with attributing emotions to humans and non-human animal behavior. Although undergoing fMRI, participants first passively observed the facial displays of human, non-human primate and domestic dogs, and subsequently judged the acceptability of emotional (e.g. 'annoyed') and facial descriptions (e.g. 'baring teeth') for the same images. For all targets, emotion attributions selectively activated regions in prefrontal and anterior temporal cortices associated with causal explanation in prior studies. These regions were similarly activated by both human and non-human targets even during the passive observation task; moreover, the degree of neural similarity was dependent on participants' self-reported beliefs in the mental capacities of non-human animals. These results encourage a non-anthropocentric view of emotion understanding, one that treats the idea that animals have emotions as no more gratuitous than the idea that humans other than ourselves do.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.