Constructing nonhuman animal emotion

Scientists and lay-people alike have long been fascinated with the emotional lives of nonhuman animals. To date, scientific approaches to the study of 'animal' emotion have assumed that emotions are biologically evolutionarily conserved, hardwired and have discrete behavioral and physiological outputs. According to this view, emotions and their outputs are homologous across species, allowing humans to accurately perceive (or 'read') animal emotion using our own concepts of what emotions are. In this paper, I discuss the challenges to that perspective and propose using an alternative theoretical approach to understand animal emotion. Adopting this alternative approach, which represents a collection of similar theories (referred to as 'Theories of Constructed Emotion'), changes the questions that we ask about animal emotion, how we study emotion across phylogeny and advance translational science, and how we understand the evolution of emotion.