Should killer whales be captive?

Photo of orcas in the wild by Paul Chetirkin/Marine Photobank

The tragic death of killer whale trainer Dawn Brancheau in Florida, after a 12,000-pound orca named Tilikum pulled her into a tank, has raised new questions about the confinement of dolphins and whales in theme parks. eScienceCommons discussed the topic with Emory neuroscientist Lori Marino, an expert on the brains of cetaceans, which include porpoises, dolphins and whales.

Q: What are some common misconceptions about killer whales, also known as orcas?

Marino: Killer whales are actually dolphins. They are called whales because they are the largest dolphins, but they are in the same family as the bottlenose dolphin. Although they are top predators, they are not naturally aggressive to people. I have colleagues who research orcas and swim with them in the wild. People will go out in very small boats and paddle among orcas. They could easily reach up and grab you and gobble you up. And yet there is not a single incident of an orca injuring, let alone killing, a person in the wild.

Q: What do we know about killer whale intelligence?

Marino: The orca brain is the most convoluted brain on the planet. These are very, very intelligent animals with major, impressive brains.

I think people would be surprised to know that orcas form cultures in the oceans, and they pass these on through generations. It’s stunning. Different groups of orcas make distinct sounds and we call these dialects. It’s like a Brooklyn accent versus a Manhattan accent.

Orcas have really creative ways of getting prey. In the Arctic, a sea lion may try to escape them by getting on a floating chunk of ice. A group of orcas will form a line and rush forward together to create a wave to make the ice chunk wobbly and throw the sea lion into the water. You see a lot of group cooperation like this among orcas.

Q: Why are you so strongly against keeping killer whales and other cetaceans in theme parks?

Marino: The normal range of an orca is several 100 kilometers per day, and they like to dive really deep. They don’t have room in these tanks to swim as far as they would like to. There is no evidence that they kill each other in the wild, but they have been known to kill each other in captivity. When you take all of that energy and put it into a small tank, a lot of stress builds up and it’s like a perfect storm waiting to happen.

I understand that people want to see these animals up close, but I want people to understand the price that the animals are paying. What happened at SeaWorld is tragic all around, for the trainer who lost her life and for the whale.

What do you think? Should killer whales be kept in theme parks for entertainment?

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What's in a dolphin's tool kit?

Dolphins have been seen using sponges, perhaps to protect their mouths from coral. And some bottlenose dolphins create rings of mud with their tails to trap fish.

"You don't need hands to create tools, you just need a clever mind," says Emory neuroscientist Lori Marino, an expert in dolphin neuroanatomy. Marino is speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting on Sunday, Feb. Feb. 21, about how the high intelligence of dolphins calls for us to rethink how we treat them.

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Read more about Marino's work in the Washington Post.

Photo by Brenda McCowan shows bottlenose dolphins playing with a bubble ring they created.

How to make your Valentine last forever

Are you seeking sustainable love?

Then don't toss all your Valentine's Day boxes after you eat the chocolates. In the video above, Emory paleontologist Tony Martin shows how to scientifically recycle them as fossil containers. You, too, can change a perishable sentiment into something to last for millennia.

If you don't receive any Valentines, you may want to read up on the research of Larry Young, Emory's "love doctor." He's studying brain chemicals linked to the ability to form lasting bonds of affection.

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A brainy time traveler

By Carol Clark

Anthropologist James Rilling, founder of Emory's Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience, is mapping the evolution of our minds.

"It's like the space program," he explains. "We believe that we should be trying to understand the universe around us. I feel the same way about exploring the brain to learn who we are and how we got here."

The Milwaukee native came to Emory as a graduate student, drawn by the anthropology department's emphasis on human biology. "It's a definite strength," says Rilling, citing the department's access to the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and the quality of the faculty.

For his dissertation, Rilling used fMRI to compare the neuroanatomy of humans and 10 other primate species at Yerkes. The 1998 study was the first in-depth look at whether the human brain is merely a scaled-up version of the brains of other primates.

“We found that human temporal lobes are larger than you would expect for a primate of our brain size,” Rilling says. “We’ve done subsequent work that shows this larger size is likely due to the evolution of language pathways in humans.”

The Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience is a leader in the use of non-invasive imaging technology to compare the neuroanatomy of living primates.

Much previous work has focused on the gray matter of brains. Rilling's group is the only one in the world using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to compare the white matter connections of monkeys, humans and our closest relative, chimpanzees. White matter contains the fiber tracts that connect and "wire" the brain.

“We’ve discovered a difference in both the size and the trajectory of the fiber tract that runs between Wernicke’s area in the left temporal lobe and Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal cortex,” Rilling says. Broca’s area is involved in speech production and Wernicke’s in understanding language. In humans, the pathway that connects the two areas is much more massive, and projects beyond Wernicke’s area down to the ventral part of the temporal lobe.

“There’s something special going on in the human brain with that pathway,” Rilling says. “It’s organized differently than in other primates.”

The lab is also exploring the neural basis of human cognition and behavior. One of its studies showed that reciprocation in humans is tied to activation of a reward pathway in the brain. “The magnitude of that reaction correlated to how likely the person was to cooperate in the future,” Rilling says.

Why are some people more cooperative than others? How does the brain change with age? What promotes social bonding and attachment? These are just a few of the many research questions the lab is tackling.

"We want to start to understand individual human differences in social behavior, at both the genetic and neurological levels," Rilling says.

He's particularly interested in understanding why some men are more nurturing as fathers than others. “It’s important to have someone besides the mother involved in a child’s care. I think one way that we could improve childhood development is to have more committed dads,” says Rilling, who is married to a psychiatrist and hopes to one day become a father.

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Do dolphins deserve special status?

From the London Times:

"Dolphins have long been recognized as among the most intelligent of animals but many researchers had placed them below chimps, which some studies have found can reach the intelligence levels of three-year-old children. Recently, however, a series of behavioral studies has suggested that dolphins, especially species such as the bottlenose, could be the brighter of the two. The studies show how dolphins have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.

"'Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,' said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

"'The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,' she added."

Marino and colleagues will present new evidence about dolphin intelligence at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, set for Feb. 18-22 in San Diego.

Marino worked on a 2001 study demonstrating mirror recognition in bottlenose dolphins (see photo), a cognitive trait shared by only a few mammals outside of humans.

Marino's work is also featured in Discovery News.

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Finally, 'Noble' Prizes for animals

Emory psychologist Frans de Waal writes in the Huffington Post:

"Time has just chosen its "Man of the Year," whose intelligence was immediately questioned, so why not review some genuine, proven Einsteins, even if they are animals?

"Animals seem to be getting smarter all the time. Since 2000, discovery after discovery has put a dent in human uniqueness claims. At the start of the decade, most of us believed that only chimpanzees might come anywhere near our wonderful human intellect, but by 2010 we realize that also dogs, birds, monkeys, and elephants challenge the human-animal divide, which has begun to look like Swiss cheese."

De Waal goes on to list "10 Animal 'Noble' Prizes for Overall Smartness," topped by a juvenile chimpanzee who surpassed humans on a cognitive task. "This is my way of celebrating the end of a decade," de Waal explains, "which has been miserable in so many ways, but not for the field of animal cognition, which is on a roll!"

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Watch the video, above, on chimpanzee culture filmed at Emory's Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

Transgenic voles key to pair bonding secrets

Emory researchers have generated the first transgenic prairie voles, a key step toward unlocking the genetic secrets of pair bonding. The advancement by Emory's Yerkes National Primate Research Center will enable scientists to perform genetic manipulations to help identify the brain mechanisms of complex social behaviors. The work, in the current issue of the Biology of Reproduction, may also have important implications for understanding and treating psychiatric disorders associated with impairments in social behavior.

The prairie vole is a naturally occurring monogamous rodent that is being used to discover the brain mechanisms underlying monogamous pair bonds.

"Domesticated lab rats and mice dominate biomedical research, but wild rodent species with more complex social behaviors are better suited for investigating the biology of the social brain. Until now, genetic engineering among rodents has been limited to lab mice and rats," says Zoe Donaldson, the lead researcher.

Watch a video of Donaldson explaining the process of creating the transgenic vole.

Single-cell prairie vole embryos were injected with a lentivirus containing a gene found in glowing jellyfish. The gene encodes a green fluorescent protein, which glows under the appropriate conditions. The prairie vole that developed from this embryo expressed the green fluorescent protein throughout its body, and the foreign gene was passed on to the offspring for multiple generations.

Larry Young, a senior investigator on the study and an expert in social behavior, will use this technology to determine whether monogamy and its associated social behaviors can be affected by manipulating a single gene. Researchers are also investigating ways to refine this technology in order to alter gene expression in certain brain regions as well as at certain developmental milestones.

Watch a talk by Young, featured speaker at Vole Conference 2009.

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Monkeys can recognize faces in photos

Capuchin monkeys can recognize familiar individuals in photographs, a study by the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory has found. The discovery is in the current online edition of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The study not only reveals that capuchin monkeys are able to individually recognize familiar faces, but it also convincingly demonstrates they understand the two-dimensional representational nature of photographs," says lead researcher Jennifer Pokorny. "The fact these monkeys correctly determined which faces belonged to in-group versus out-group members, corresponding to their personal experiences, validates the conclusion that capuchin monkeys view images of faces as humans do -- as individuals they do or do not know.

For the study, the capuchins viewed photographs of four different faces. One of the four pictures was of a capuchin from their own group, which they needed to tell apart from three strangers. They also needed to do the reverse, differentiating one stranger from three familiar individuals.

“This required monkeys to look at similar-looking faces and use their personal knowledge of group mates to solve the task,” says Pokorny. "They readily performed the task and continued to do well when shown new pictures in color and in gray-scale, as well as when presented with individuals they had never before seen in pictures, though with whom they were personally familiar."

Researchers often use two-dimensional images in experiments, yet there is little conclusive evidence to suggest nonhuman primates, particularly monkeys, truly understand the image represents individuals or items in real life.

Pokorny trained under Emory primatologist Frans de Waal, who says the study is the first to show face recognition in monkeys is fundamentally similar to that in humans, indicating that face recognition is an evolutionarily ancient ability. De Waal is director of the Yerkes Living Links Center.

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'Monkey see, monkey do' spreads social customs

Capuchin monkeys have a capacity for social learning that allows them to create group-wide social traditions, according to researchers at Emory's Yerkes National Primate Research Center and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Their finding, published by the Public Library of Science One (PLoS One), is the first study to experimentally demonstrate the spreading of two different traditions in different groups of monkeys and suggests certain behaviors are learned and spread socially, similar to the way humans and chimpanzees learn social customs.

For the study, the alpha male of each of two groups of capuchins was trained to open an artificial foraging device in a different way, using either a slide or lift action, then reunited with his group. In each group, a majority of monkeys subsequently mastered the task. Although a majority of the monkeys also discovered the alternative method, each monkey that successfully opened the device continuously imitated and adopted the technique seeded by the alpha male of the group as the primary method.

"Being able to understand and learn about another's actions and then adopt that behavior is how a tradition if formed," says lead Yerkes researcher Marietta Dindo.

"We previously assumed cultural transmission of behaviors is unique to humans and their closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees. Our findings suggest the underlying mechanism that supports culture may be based on a very simple principle of acting like and identifying with those around you."

Dindo trained under Emory primatologist Frans de Waal, who credits the study as a promising first step to take cultural studies from apes to monkeys.

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Creationist drives readers bananas

Need a bookmark to go with your Ray Comfort edition of "On the Origin of Species?" The National Center for Science Education has thoughtfully provided one on its web site dontdissdarwin.com. Comfort, a Christian evangelist, distributed 200,000 copies of "Origin" free at 100 colleges around the country this week, including Emory. The catch? Comfort wrote an outlandish introduction in the edition, denouncing evolution.

"They made this version of the book to pass out to unknowing people who are thinking that they're getting a copy of 'Origin of Species,' when they're really just advancing the creationist agenda," biologist Jacobus de Roode told the Emory Wheel. "It's very bad, and it makes me very angry."

"I think Darwin's rolling over in his grave right now," added freshman June Lee.

Read the full article in the Wheel.

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Wolves in political clothing

Leaving everyone to fend for themselves is not natural, says primatologist Frans de Waal. He writes as a guest blogger for the Washington Post about animal empathy and its political implications:

"On its own, a wolf cannot bring down large prey, and chimpanzees slow down for companions who cannot keep up due to injuries or sick offspring. Why accept the assumption of cut-throat nature when there is so much proof to the contrary? Empathy is an ancient capacity found in all mammals, ranging from dogs to apes." Read the full article by de Waal.

Don't miss an informal, public discussion between Frans de Waal and Out of Hand Theater's Ariel de Man this Sunday, Nov. 15, at 4 p.m. at Dobbs University Center. They will be discussing the new play Hominid, opening on campus tonight.

De Waal will also be among the speakers at the Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture conference, ongoing today and tomorrow in the Reception Hall of the Carlos Museum.

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Celebrating Darwin's legacy

What is it that makes the human brain different from the brain of our closest relative, the chimpanzee, besides the larger size? What are the origins of empathy, fairness and cooperation? What constitutes culture in humans and other species, and how far back can we trace it?

Some of the world’s leading scholars of evolution – including many from Emory – will gather to discuss these questions during the conference on the Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture Nov. 12-13. The free, public event – held in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth – will give an overview of the latest discoveries in biological, cognitive and cultural studies of evolution.

“We are taking the conceptual and theoretical tools that Darwin gave us and putting them in the midst of contemporary thought and controversies,” said Robert McCauley, director of the Emory Center for Mind, Brain and Culture, which is hosting the event. “We’re taking a forward look at Darwin’s legacy.”

Award-winning science writer Matt Ridley, author of “Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code” and “Nature via Nurture,” will give the keynote, “Darwin in Genes and Culture,” at 1 p.m. on Thursday.

Click here for more details of the two-day event.

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Gestures may point to speech origins

Did speech evolve from vocal chords or bodily movements?

Body movement, particularly with the hands, appears to be ingrained in human communication. “All humans gesture. They gesture when they talk on the phone, they gesture even if they know the other person can’t see them,” says primatologist Amy Pollick. She is studying evolutionary precursors to speech in chimpanzees at the Yerkes Living Links Center at Emory.

“Chimp vocalizations can actually be quite complex, but they don’t have as many vocalizations as they do gestures,” she says.

Watch an interview with Pollick in this excerpt from a Swedish documentary. Photo at top shows a scene from the documentary, "On the Road with Homo Sapiens."

Ape murder-suicide leads to human drama

A conniving kingmaker and his young protégé conspire to overthrow a popular king. Their plot fails, so they murder him instead. The kingmaker then installs his protégé as ruler. The young king does not properly reward his mentor, however, so the kingmaker selects a new protégé. Together, they torment the young king to the point of madness. He throws himself into the palace moat and drowns.

The brutal power struggle reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, but it actually happened on an island of captive chimpanzees at a Holland zoo during the late 1970s. Emory primatologist Frans de Waal documented the events in his best-selling book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes."

And now, in a strange case of art aping life, the true story has been turned into a fictional play – with human actors taking the names and roles of the chimpanzee characters.

“We are all apes,” is the central message of “Hominid,” (photo at top shows a rehearsal) playing at Emory Nov. 12-22. Theater Emory commissioned Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater to create the evolution-themed work – a collaboration of playwrights’ imaginations and de Waal’s research. Scenes from a documentary by Bert Haanstra of the chimpanzees are also woven into the stage performance.

“We tell the story as though it’s a human story,” says Ariel de Man, the play’s project director. After receiving her theater degree from Emory in 1998, de Man co-founded Out of Hand, which specializes in working with scientists to translate their research.“There is so much science happening right here in our midst in Atlanta that the general public doesn’t know about,” she says. “Scientists are trained to do research, but they’re not trained to communicate to a non-science audience.”

“Hominid” sets the murder-suicide in a 1920s garden party. “The characters are athletic and graceful and charming,” de Man says. “The point is, it doesn’t matter how educated or sophisticated you are – we are all apes. We are inviting the audience to think about what that means.”

Top evolution scholars from Emory and abroad will also be speaking on campus next week, during a conference, "The Evolution of Mind, Brain and Culture."

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The science of love

Can love potions move from fairy tale to fact? Studies are showing the potential to chemically manipulate affection and social bonding.

“A single molecule can have a profound effect on relationships,” said Emory neuroscience Larry Young, during his recent “Life of the Mind” talk. His research involves prairie voles, highly social animals that tend to form life-long bonds with their mates.

An infusion of oxytocin, a hormone associated with neural rewards and addictions, can cause female prairie voles to become attached to the nearest male, while the hormone vasopressin spurs males’ interest in a female. Male prairie voles with a genetically limited response to vasopressin were less likely to bond to a mate. Other researchers have identified similar behavior in human males with this genetic trait.

But what about plasticity of the brain, asked religion scholar Bobbi Patterson, who led a conversation with Young, following his lecture. Patterson studies how ancient contemplative communities practiced shaping their minds. Their ultimate goal was for love and compassion, minus the intense hormonal urges. “The biochemistry of the brain, they thought of that as the juices of human behavior, the passions – things that would get you in trouble by sexual behaviors or violence – they would try to block that by training the mind,” Patterson said. “When humans are involved in love and compassion, there’s this sense of making a choice.”

Studies have revealed that even prairie voles have a great deal of plasticity, and that their experiences can shape their hormone levels and their behaviors, said Young. He also cited Emory research showing that women who were seriously abused as children have low oxytocin levels as adults.

“Much more of our behavior is probably determined by cortical structures that are sort of integrating what is the social structure, what is expected of me,” Young said. “You can inhibit or activate certain of these components much more easily than a vole.”

Still, biology plays an undeniable role in our ability to love and form social bonds, he said. “A lot of people say, ‘Doesn’t that take away a lot of the magic?’ But, to me, it’s even more beautiful to think that love is being produced through neurotransmission.”

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Gorilla vet tracks microbes for global health

Innocent Rwego’s hometown of Kisoro, Uganda, is nestled amid the volcanic mountains at the border of Congo and Rwanda – near the habitat of endangered mountain gorillas.

Growing up, however, he never saw a gorilla. “You have to pay to enter the national parks, and most of the locals cannot afford it,” says Rwego, a post-doctoral fellow in Emory's environmental studies department.

Following in the footsteps of his police detective father did not interest him: His childhood idol was the town’s sole veterinarian. When his family went to buy freshly slaughtered meat, he would see Dr. Bisangwa inspecting the carcasses for disease. When one of his grandfather’s cows fell ill, Dr. Bisangwa would be summoned. “I was impressed that he could treat an animal that was down, and it would be up on its feet again in a few hours,” Rwego says.

Dogs in the town were more guards than pets, prized for their ferociousness, and rabies was not uncommon. “Dr. Bisangwa seemed very brave to me,” Rwego says. “He knew how to grab a vicious dog, so that he could immunize it.”

Rwego attended college and veterinary school at Makerere University in Kampala, intending to become a village vet. But near the end of his schooling, he assisted in a mountain gorilla research project.

The researchers entered Bwindi Impenetrable National Park behind a machete-wielding guide who hacked out their path. After hours of hiking through the dense, hilly forest, they came upon a gorilla family, peacefully munching on leaves.

“I was amazed,” Rwego says. “The silverback male was a huge animal, but so quiet and confident.”


After he graduated, Rwego worked in the national park for four years as a mountain gorilla vet. He sometimes had to assist curious young gorillas that set off traps intended for antelope. It was a tricky task. Although gorillas are peaceful animals, the males will attack someone threatening their family members.

Once when Rwego darted a young one, a nearby silverback heard it cry out, charged in, grabbed the tranquilized youngster, and ran off. Rwego’s team followed the gorilla group, and eventually he managed to remove the wires that were cutting into the arm of the young one.

Rwego went on to become a lecturer at Makerere University. He also serves on the scientific committee of the UNESCO DIVERSITAS ecoHEALTH Cross-cutting Network, which is charged with protecting biodiversity.

“I care about the health of all animals – including man,” Rwego says. He studies how the overlap of humans, domestic animals and wildlife contributes to the transmission of disease and parasites.

At Emory, Rwego works with primate disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, who has established one of the world’s leading labs for the medical analysis of gorilla feces. The lab work is hardly glamorous, but intensely important. While the H1N1 flu outbreak started in pigs, ebola and HIV have been linked to wild primates, which are also susceptible to human diseases.

Tracking microbes that move amid species gives scientists a better chance of stemming the next pandemic – or preventing one. “Traditionally, vets work alone, medical doctors work alone and ecologists work alone,” Rwego says. “We need to work together to understand how pathogens are evolving and new diseases are emerging.”

No one is immune to the threat. “The world is becoming a village,” Rwego says. “A disease that breaks out in my hometown can be here within 48 hours.”

Mountain gorilla photos by Innocent Rwego.

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The biology of shared laughter and emotion

"It's almost impossible not to laugh when everybody else is," writes psychologist Frans de Waal, in his new book "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society."

Natural History Magazine offers an excerpt of the book:

"The infectiousness of laughter even works across species. Below my office window at the Yerkes Primate Center, I often hear my chimps laugh during rough-and-tumble games, and cannot suppress a chuckle myself. It’s such a happy sound. Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance. And when young apes put on their “play face” (as the laugh expression is known), their friends join in with the same expression as rapidly and easily as humans do with laughter.

"Shared laughter is just one example of our primate sensitivity to others. We aren’t Robinson Crusoes, sitting on separate islands; we’re all interconnected, both bodily and emotionally. This may be an odd thing to say in the West, with its tradition of individualism and liberty, but members of the species Homo sapiens are easily swayed in one emotional direction or another by their fellows.
"That is where empathy and sympathy start—with the synchronization of bodies—not in the higher regions of imagination, or in the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s 'shoes.' And yet empathy is often presented as a voluntary process, requiring role taking, higher cognition, and even language. Accordingly, most scholarly literature on empathy is completely human centered, never mentioning other animals. As if a capacity so visceral and pervasive could be anything other than biological! To counter such widespread views, I decided to investigate how chimpanzees relate to and learn from one another."
Read the full excerpt in Natural History. You can also read reviews of "The Age of Empathy" in the Economist and New Scientist.

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Chimps mirror emotion in cartoons

Animation by Devyn Carter, lead research specialist, using LightWave 3D, NewTek, Inc.

Emory researchers have documented the first example of chimpanzees empathizing with computer animation. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is part of an effort to learn more about the impact of cartoons and video games on the human brain.

“Humans experience emotional engagement with animated characters, empathizing with happiness, sadness or other emotions displayed by the characters,” said Matthew Campbell, a post-doctoral fellow in psychobiology, and the lead researcher. “Previous studies have suggested this type of emotional engagement may be to blame when children mimic violent video games and cartoons, so we thought it important to learn more.”

Yawns were chosen for the chimpanzee study, since they are large, unmistakable expressions, and they are contagious – the way that smiles, frowns and fear are contagious.



The chimps yawned significantly more in response to 3D animations of yawning than they did to animated chimps making control mouth movements.

“Next, we want to study what aspects of animation make it more or less likely to be mimicked,” Campbell said. “One of the first things we’re going to look at is whether realism is important for the chimpanzees to empathize with what they’re seeing."

The knowledge gained could help in the design of animation to promote imitation, such as therapies for children with autism, or to limit imitation, such as violent video games.

Campbell’s advisor is psychologist Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

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How early nurturing affects adult love

Emory researchers have demonstrated that prairie voles may be a useful model in understanding the neurochemistry of social behavior. In a recent study, they compared prairie vole pups raised by single mothers to pups raised by both parents to determine the effects of these types of early social environments on adult social behavior.

"Very simply, altering their early social experience influenced adult bonding," said Todd Ahern, a graduate student in neuroscience.

The pups raised by single mothers "were slower to make life-long partnerships, and they showed less interest in nurturing pups in their communal families," said Larry Young, who directs a lab in social neurobiology at Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

The researchers also found differences in the oxytocin system. Oxytocin is best known for its roles in maternal labor and suckling but, more recently, it has been tied to prosocial behavior, such as bonding, trust and social awareness.

Read the published study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

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Learning morality from monkeys

"I'm very interested in the origin of morality," says psychologist Frans de Waal, director of the Yerkes Living Links Center, who studies primates for clues to human evolution. De Waal advocates the theory of Scottish philosopher David Hume, that human morality grew out of moral sentiments, instead of a rational process.

"I believe very strongly that actually (our morality) came out of our psychology, and our psychology is a primate psychology," de Waal says. "In primates you can see many of these same tendencies, you see empathy and sympathy. You see reciprocity and retribution. You see rules that are reinforced, and they beat up someone who doesn't follow the rules."