News and Events

The expression and perception of emotions play an important role in social species, as they regulate interactions. The existence of similarities between species in the expression of emotions had already been suggested by Darwin in 1872. However, since methods for scientifically and objectively studying animal emotions have only recently been developed, it is not clear whether these similarities actually exist. I will describe the results of a large comparative study, where we investigated similarities in the vocal expression of emotions in several species of domestic (horses, pigs, goats and cattle) and wild ungulates (Przewalski's and boars), as well as the perception of emotions within and between species, including human perception of ungulate emotions. More recently, we have also incorporated machine learning algorithms (AI) to investigate the potential of these techniques for automatic classification of emotions within and across species. These results present interesting insights into the evolution of vocal expression of emotions and the factors that may influence cross-species perception of emotions. 

Dr. Briefer is a behavioural ecologist, who has been studying animal behaviour and more particularly bioacoustics for over 20 years. She has been working on a wide range of species, from songbirds to ungulates, and has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and the head of the Behavioural Ecology Group. 

This program is made possible by the Ethics Center, with Support from the Krebs Center for the Humanities, and the HUMAN Grant.