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nprfreshair:
Sex, Empathy, Jealousy: How Emotions And Behavior Of Other Primates Mirror Our Own
When Frans de Waal first started out, studying nonhuman primates in the Netherlands more than 40 years ago, he was told not to consider the emotions of the animals he was observing.
“Thoughts and feelings — the mental processes basically — were off limits,” he says. “We were told not to talk about them, because they were considered by many scientists as ‘inner states’ and you only were allowed to talk about ‘outer states.’ ”
But over the course of his career, de Waal became convinced that primates and other animals express emotions similar to humans. He’s now the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Ga., where his office window looks out on a colony of chimps.
“I am now at the point that I think emotions are more like organs,” he says. “All my organs are present in a rat’s body; and the same way, I think, all my emotions are probably present in the rat.”
De Waal writes about primate empathy, rivalry, bonding, sex and murder in his new book, Mama’s Last Hug. The title of the book was inspired by a tender interaction between a dying 59-year-old chimp named Mama and de Waal’s mentor, Jan van Hooff, who had known Mama for more than 40 years.
“People were surprised [by] how human-like the expression of Mama was and how human-like her gestures were,” de Waal says of the interaction. “I thought, 'Well, everyone knows that chimps are our closest relative, so why wouldn’t the way they express their emotions be extremely similar to ours?’ But people were surprised by that.”
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
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nprfreshair:
Sex, Empathy, Jealousy: How Emotions And Behavior Of Other Primates Mirror Our Own
When Frans de Waal first started out, studying nonhuman primates in the Netherlands more than 40 years ago, he was told not to consider the emotions of the animals he was observing.
“Thoughts and feelings — the mental processes basically — were off limits,” he says. “We were told not to talk about them, because they were considered by many scientists as ‘inner states’ and you only were allowed to talk about ‘outer states.’ ”
But over the course of his career, de Waal became convinced that primates and other animals express emotions similar to humans. He’s now the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Ga., where his office window looks out on a colony of chimps.
“I am now at the point that I think emotions are more like organs,” he says. “All my organs are present in a rat’s body; and the same way, I think, all my emotions are probably present in the rat.”
De Waal writes about primate empathy, rivalry, bonding, sex and murder in his new book, Mama’s Last Hug. The title of the book was inspired by a tender interaction between a dying 59-year-old chimp named Mama and de Waal’s mentor, Jan van Hooff, who had known Mama for more than 40 years.
“People were surprised [by] how human-like the expression of Mama was and how human-like her gestures were,” de Waal says of the interaction. “I thought, 'Well, everyone knows that chimps are our closest relative, so why wouldn’t the way they express their emotions be extremely similar to ours?’ But people were surprised by that.”
Photo: AFP/Getty Images
(Your picture was not posted)
