ArticleFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience2017
Do Insects Have Emotions? Some Insights from Bumble Bees.
Article in Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Exploring emotional expression in invertebrates: mechanisms, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Buzzed but not elated? Effect of ethanol on cognitive judgement bias in honeybees.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- The exploration of consciousness in insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Age and attitude: How longevity influences cognitive biases in honeybee workers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Recognising depression in non-human primates: a narrative review of reported signs of depression.PeerJ · 2025Review
- Stress produces negative judgement bias in cuttlefish.Biology letters · 2024Article
- Physically stressed bees expect less reward in an active choice judgement bias test.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Male attractiveness is subjective to exposure to males of different attractiveness in fruit flies.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Judgement bias may be explained by shifts in stimulus response curves.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Challenges in farmed insect welfare: Beyond the question of sentience.Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2023Article
- Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence suggests affective pain experience in octopus.iScience · 2021Article
- Emotions as Abstract Evaluation Criteria in Biological and Artificial Intelligences.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2021Article
- Editorial: Context-Dependent Plasticity in Social Species: Feedback Loops Between Individual and Social Environment.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Uneven substrates constrain walking speed in ants through modulation of stride frequency more than stride length.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- On the emergence of cognition: from catalytic closure to neuroglial closure.Journal of biological physics · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While our conceptual understanding of emotions is largely based on human subjective experiences, research in comparative cognition has shown growing interest in the existence and identification of "emotion-like" states in non-human animals. There is still ongoing debate about the nature of emotions in animals (especially invertebrates), and certainly their existence and the existence of certain expressive behaviors displaying internal emotional states raise a number of exciting and challenging questions. Interestingly, at least superficially, insects (bees and flies) seem to fulfill the basic requirements of emotional behavior. Yet, recent works go a step further by adopting terminologies and interpretational frameworks that could have been considered as crude anthropocentrism and that now seem acceptable in the scientific literature on invertebrate behavior and cognition. This change in paradigm requires, therefore, that the question of emotions in invertebrates is reconsidered from a cautious perspective and with parsimonious explanations. Here we review and discuss this controversial topic based on the recent finding that bumblebees experience positive emotions while experiencing unexpected sucrose rewards, but also incorporating a broader survey of recent literature in which similar claims have been done for other invertebrates. We maintain that caution is warranted before attributing emotion-like states to honey bees and bumble bees as some experimental caveats may undermine definitive conclusions. We suggest that interpreting many of these findings in terms of motivational drives may be less anthropocentrically biased and more cautious, at least until more careful experiments warrant the use of an emotion-related terminology.
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