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Lori Marino is a senior lecturer in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Program at Emory University and has researched primate, dolphin, and whale intelligence and brain evolution for decades. She has also worked on key studies of dolphin cognition, proving, along with Diana Reiss, that dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors. “I think that emotions "although they are subject to selection" are one of the oldest parts of psychology, laid down in the first animals," Marino told me. "This is because without emotions an individual cannot act or make the kinds of decisions that are key to survival. Of course, some emotions are basic and others are tied into cognitive processes, so some are more complex than others. But every animal has emotions."
The ethologist Jonathan Balcombe believes that emotions likely evolved with consciousness, as the two serve each other. Today, researchers are no longer debating whether other animals are conscious, but, instead, to what degree. Recent studies have attempted to show that consciousness isn't limited to humans, great apes, mammals, or even, perhaps, vertebrates. A subset of these animals has also been shown to be self-conscious in the context of cognitive and behavioral experiments; that is, they were able to conceive of themselves as beings independent from other animals and from the rest of their environment. Mirror recognition tests are the stock in trade of animal cognition research; they consist of drawing or dyeing a mark on an animal's body and then placing a mirror in front of them. If while looking in the mirror the animal touches the marked spot in a statistically significant manner, he or she is demonstrating self-awareness. That is, the animals are using the mirror as a tool to explore the mark that wasn't there before, something the researchers consider proof that the animals conceive of themselves as the beings in the mirror.
As of this writing, the only animals to have been proven self-aware in such a way are chimpanzees, orangutans, elephants, orcas, belugas, bottlenose dolphins, magpies, and humans, but only after the age of two. Pigs have been tested, but the results were inconclusive. One pig looked behind the mirror to find the food reflected in it. And while African Grey parrots used the mirrors as tools to find food in cupboards, it was not obvious that they recognized themselves. These experiments, while helpful, demonstrate only which animals are interested in looking at themselves in mirrors. The actual list of self-aware animals may be much longer. The African Greys, for example, might have known that they were looking at themselves but may have found the mirrors more worthwhile to use as tools for finding snacks. Not caring about what you look like isn't the same as not knowing what you look like.
In 2012 a group of prominent neuroanatomists, cognitive neuroscientists, neurophysiologists, and ethologists released the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. The declaration sought to establish, once and for all, that mammals, birds, and even some cephalopods, like octopi, are conscious creatures with the capacity to experience emotions. The authors argued that convergent evolution in animals gave many creatures the capacity for emotional experiences, even if they don't have a cortex, or at least one as complex as the human neocortex.
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Laurel Braitman (Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves)