Professor Ximena Nelson is part of a team studying the vocalisations of various animals and what they mean in terms of how animals express their feelings. Professor Nelson has been focussing on kea because the facial anatomy of birds mean that they express themselves in a different way from mammals. Her research has been enabled by philanthropic funding from the Templeton World Charity Foundation.
The vocalisations of the cheeky snow-loving parrot suggest they are capable of feeling something that we would consider to be joy.
Professor Ximena Nelson has been researching kea vocalisations and expressions of emotion. She works alongside a team of international collaborators studying the emotional expressions of various animals, including dolphins and apes.
The research is being funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which, amongst its many priorities, supports research and discovery into diverse intelligences.
“People have much more empathy for animals that they understand, or with which they have a shared commonality,” said Professor Nelson. “The more we know that an animal is similar to us, the more we empathise. This has fundamentally changed not only how we manage pests in the environment, but also how we think about the way we expend the finite amount of money we have available for conservation.”
The Animal Welfare Act was established based on the realisation that animals, particularly mammals, could feel negative things like pain and anguish. Understanding whether they could have more “esoteric” experiences, such as joy or other positive emotions, could create a greater empathy that would affect the focus of conservation efforts and the way humans interact with other species as our habitats continue to overlap.
With kea, Professor Nelson and her team of UC students started deciphering the meanings of their various calls through recording the calls of various birds in different areas and then playing them back to other kea to see if their behaviour would change. One call, that they named the ‘warble’, stood out.
“It was one that we had already ascertained was typically done when the kea were playing,” said Professor Nelson.
“We did these playback studies and found that when they heard the warble call, it immediately triggered a play response. Interestingly, that happens even the kea is alone. So if the kea is by itself and it hears a warble call, it will just start tap-dancing by itself.”
It’s generally more difficult to measure positive emotion because such expressions were less universal than others. In most species, expressions such as a squeal or a wail are recognised as signs of pain or distress.
“One of the nice things about using kea in this particular work is that birds have a completely different musculature in their face compared with mammals, especially primates. Primates can smile; obviously kea can’t. Humans associate smiles with something positive. Birds can’t express these things we associate with positive emotion very easily so we need another way of measuring positive emotion in them.
“The reality is we see much more in common – and empathise – with the ‘cuter’ animals because they have baby-like attributes to which we have an innate disposition, for example large forward facing eyes, and it’s just an unconscious bias. But that unconscious bias can also be trained and reduced by improving the knowledge of the shared characteristics we have with other animals.”
She hopes that her research into kea expressions of positive emotion might also lead people to think about other vulnerable, threatened or endangered animals, such as endemic geckos, tree wētā or katipō spiders, that don’t have mammalian facial musculature, and consider that they, too, might have more in common with us than we had ever thought.
