“We feel sorry because we cry,” wrote the philosopher and psychologist William James, “angry because we attack, fearful because we tremble,” suggests that emotional body responses such as crying cause cognitive changes, such as feelings of sadness.
Actually, research has shown that human body responses and cognitive changes are affected with each other in both directions. We feel sorry because we cry, but we also cry when we feel sorry. So how for our prime cousins? To date, their connections have remained largely unexplored.
Now, a team of researchers from the University of Kyoto has directed a study on six Japanese macaques living in the center of evolutionary origins of Kyotou’s human behavior, in the prefecture of Aichi. The researchers focused on Self-laps – a body response linked to negative emotions such as anxiety and fear- and its relationship with pessimistic biaswhich is the tendency to expect a negative result when facing ambiguous information.
Presenting the monkeys with a target gratifying button And a black Non -rewarded buttonalong with a gray ambiguous buttonThe researchers were able to estimate the degree of pessimism of each monkey. The monkeys also surrounded to identify the moment of self-communication, analyzing the relationship between self-space and pessimism.
“The body responses associated with negative emotions can predict posterior cognitive pessimism,” says the corresponding author Sakumi Iki, “but not vice versa.”
In other words, the monkeys were more likely to make pessimistic judgments, avoiding the gray button, immediately after the self -communication, however, to make a pessimistic judgment not necessarily led to the self -accusation. This contrasts with humans, for whom evidence suggests that a pessimistic way of thinking can cause bodily responses. That this influence did not appear in the macaques suggests that their emotional body responses can precede cognitive changes.
From an evolutionary point of view, the coping strategy of first addressing immediate needs through bodily responses and then participating in cognitive information processing is probably adaptive to face challenges in natural habitats. Therefore, this mechanism could have existed long before humans and macaques diverge, indicating an evolutionarily preserved system.
“In humans, the relationship between the mind and the body may have evolved distinctively, influenced by our use of advanced language and introspection,” adds Iki.
“But it could be observable in monkeys if different bodily reactions or cognitive processes are examined.”
Future research involving a broader range of primates and other animals could shed more light on the evolutionary origins of human emotions and deepen our understanding of the connection between the mind and the body.