ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Negative emotional contagion and cognitive bias in common ravens (
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social information about others' affective states in a human-altered world.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Review
- Pupillometry and brain-wide c-Fos mapping uncover multimodal mirror emotional contagion related networks of mice.iScience · 2026Article
- A large-scale study across the avian clade identifies ecological drivers of neophobia.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Dimensions of corvid consciousness.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Modifying the Attention Bias Test to Assess the Emotional State of Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Pair-bond strength is consistent and related to partner responsiveness in a wild corvid.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Possible relations between emotional contagion and social buffering.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Emotional "Contagion" in Piglets after Sensory Avoidance of Rewarding and Punishing Treatment.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Article
- Playback of rat 22-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations as a translational assay of negative affective states: An analysis of evoked behavior and brain activity.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Judgement bias may be explained by shifts in stimulus response curves.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- No Evidence for Contagious Yawning in Juvenile Ravens (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- My Fear Is Not, and Never Will Be, Your Fear: On Emotions and Feelings in Animals.Affective science · 2022Article
- Testing the contagious nature of allopreening: bystander ravens are affected by conspecifics' affiliative interactions.Animal behaviour · 2022Article
- Emotional contagion in nonhuman animals: A review.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Review
- Watching others in a positive state does not induce optimism bias in common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus), but leads to behaviour indicative of competition.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Early evidence for emotional play contagion in juvenile ravens.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Wild jackdaws respond to their partner's distress, but not with consolation.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Collective Emotional Contagion in Zebrafish.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Negative play contagion in calves.Scientific reports · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Emotional contagion is described as an emotional state matching between subjects, and has been suggested to facilitate communication and coordination in complex social groups. Empirical studies typically focus on the measurement of behavioral contagion and emotional arousal, yet, while highly important, such an approach often disregards an additional evaluation of the underlying emotional valence. Here, we studied emotional contagion in ravens by applying a judgment bias paradigm to assess emotional valence. We experimentally manipulated positive and negative affective states in demonstrator ravens, to which they responded with increased attention and interest in the positive condition, as well as increased redirected behavior and a left-eye lateralization in the negative condition. During this emotion manipulation, another raven observed the demonstrator's behavior, and we used a bias paradigm to assess the emotional valence of the observer to determine whether emotional contagion had occurred. Observers showed a pessimism bias toward the presented ambiguous stimuli after perceiving demonstrators in a negative state, indicating emotional state matching based on the demonstrators' behavioral cues and confirming our prediction of negative emotional contagion. We did not find any judgment bias in the positive condition. This result critically expands upon observational studies of contagious play in ravens, providing experimental evidence that emotional contagion is present not only in mammalian but also in avian species. Importantly, this finding also acts as a stepping stone toward understanding the evolution of empathy, as this essential social skill may have emerged across these taxa in response to similar socioecological challenges.
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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.