ArticleApplied animal behaviour science2018
Animal emotion: Descriptive and prescriptive definitions and their implications for a comparative perspective.
Article in Applied animal behaviour science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 papers.
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Who cites it
61 citing papers in PubMed.
- Exploring emotional expression in invertebrates: mechanisms, functions and phylogeny.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Tail-rattling in rodents: more than a threat display.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2026Review
- Quantifying and categorising the animal welfare impacts caused by biological invasions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Human recognition of emotional valence and arousal of zoo animals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Unveiling welfare concerns in Japanese exotic animal cafes.The Journal of veterinary medical science · 2025Article
- Species-independent analysis and identification of emotional animal vocalizations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dog facial landmarks detection and its applications for facial analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Machine learning algorithms can predict emotional valence across ungulate vocalizations.iScience · 2025Article
- Non-verbal effecting - animal research sheds light on human emotion communication.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- The metabolic basis of cancer-related fatigue.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Review
- The Challenge of Defining Laterality in Horses: Is It Laterality or Just Asymmetry?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- Emotion in Nonverbal Communication: Comparing Animal and Human Vocalizations and Human Text Messages.Emotion review : journal of the International Society for Research on Emotion · 2025Article
- Explainable classification of goat vocalizations using convolutional neural networks.PloS one · 2025Article
- Horses are worthy of care: Horse sector participants' attitudes towards animal sentience, welfare, and well-being.Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2025Article
- A consensus on the definition of positive animal welfare.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Knowledge, attitude, and implementation of animal welfare among duck farmers in West Kalimantan, Indonesia: The role of farmers' characteristics.Open veterinary journal · 2025Article
- Possible relations between emotional contagion and social buffering.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- MakingAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Problem Behaviours and Relinquishment: Challenges Faced by Clinical Animal Behaviourists When Assessing Fear and Frustration.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- You are How You Eat: Foraging Behavior as a Potential Novel Marker of Rat Affective State.Affective science · 2024Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
In recent years there has been a growing research interest in the field of animal emotion. But there is still little agreement about whether and how the word "emotion" should be defined for use in the context of non-human species. Here, we make a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive definitions. Descriptive definitions delineate the ways in which the word emotion is used in everyday life. Prescriptive definitions are used to pick out the set of events that scientific theories of emotion purport to explain. Picking out three prescriptive definitions, we show that the different ways in which emotions are defined correspond to processes that are distributed differentially across the animal kingdom. We propose that these definitions provide a useful starting point for investigating the varying emotional capacities of a wide range of animals, providing a basis for a new, comparative science of emotion.
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