Do you know a friend with a contagious laugh or smile? Has someone else’s good or bad mood ever rubbed off on you? Chances are, you answered yes to both of these questions. These forms of empathy, called behavioral and emotional contagion, are an important part of natural human social interaction. But did you know that the same thing happens in animals too? I’m sure you’ve also experienced contagious yawning, where seeing someone else yawn makes you yawn too, even if you aren’t feeling sleepy. It turns out that dogs, primates, and parakeets all share this behavior with us humans. This is a specific example of behavioral contagion, the mirroring of another’s actions. It was believed that behavioral contagion sets the stage for emotional contagion in animals. In other words, copying another animal’s actions is the first step to start aligning their moods. However, recent research on ravens shows that this might not be the case.
Scientists studied play behavior in young ravens, and found that seeing other ravens playing put observers in a more playful mood too! There are 3 different types of playing the ravens can do: object play (picking up and moving things around them), social play (playing with others), and locomotion play (jumping, walking, and other kinds of moving around). The scientists determined that the more playful mood of the observers was because of emotional and not behavioral contagion based on what kinds of play the observing ravens were doing. To set up their experiment, the scientists made a super cool playground full of fun things for the ravens to play with, and let demonstrators use it while others watched. When there were demonstrators doing object play by engaging with the playground, observers also played more, but not with objects. Because the observer ravens did more locomotive and social play compared to how much they would normally after watching the demonstrators, and not more object play, we can see that they don’t need to copy exactly what others are doing to feel more playful.
The fact that even the very young ravens the scientists studied have this type of emotional empathy shows how important it must be when growing up and living in a social group. It is cool to think about how animals can be similar to us humans, and this research shows that they can even think and feel in some of the same ways we do. Of course, we can always discover more about the ways animals display emotional contagion. For example, the scientists that did this study were also curious about whether ravens who are closer friends would be better at sharing their playful moods. For now, however, this question still stands. Maybe someday a young scientist like you could help us find the answers!
References
- Wenig, K., Boucherie, P.H., and Bugnyar, T. (2021). Early evidence for emotional play contagion in juvenile ravens Animal Cognition 24, 717-729
