Can nonhuman animals truly feel schadenfreude like humans do?

Lens adapted to this topic: Animal emotion may be real without human concepts

A more animal-sentience-centered interpretation argues that demanding human language, reflection, or explicit concepts before crediting animals with emotion sets the bar too high. On this view, observable pleasure and social responses may be meaningful evidence of affect, even if animals do not experience schadenfreude in exactly the human form.

• Some researchers argue that animals’ emotional displays can provide informative windows into internal states, and that reluctance to credit animals with emotions is not justified by evolutionary and empirical evidence.
• Emotions may exist without conscious feelings or abstract concepts, so the absence of evidence for human-like reflection does not rule out affective states in animals.
• Chimpanzees’ willingness to incur costs to watch antisocial individuals being punished is compatible with a sophisticated social response, though it does not by itself prove schadenfreude.
• The strongest animal case would concern a species showing both a positive response to another’s misfortune and contextual sensitivity to rivalry, blame, or deservingness; the supplied evidence does not yet establish that combination.

Featured sourceMy Fear Is Not, and Never Will Be, Your Fear: On Emotions and Feelings in Animalslink.springer.com6 sourcesView sources