Perry Clint J, Baciadonna Luigi
School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK
School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK.
J Exp Biol. 2017 Nov 1;220(Pt 21):3856-3868. doi: 10.1242/jeb.151308.
Until recently, whether invertebrates might exhibit emotions was unknown. This possibility has traditionally been dismissed by many as emotions are frequently defined with reference to human subjective experience, and invertebrates are often not considered to have the neural requirements for such sophisticated abilities. However, emotions are understood in humans and other vertebrates to be multifaceted brain states, comprising dissociable subjective, cognitive, behavioural and physiological components. In addition, accumulating literature is providing evidence of the impressive cognitive capacities and behavioural flexibility of invertebrates. Alongside these, within the past few years, a number of studies have adapted methods for assessing emotions in humans and other animals, to invertebrates, with intriguing results. Sea slugs, bees, crayfish, snails, crabs, flies and ants have all been shown to display various cognitive, behavioural and/or physiological phenomena that indicate internal states reminiscent of what we consider to be emotions. Given the limited neural architecture of many invertebrates, and the powerful tools available within invertebrate research, these results provide new opportunities for unveiling the neural mechanisms behind emotions and open new avenues towards the pharmacological manipulation of emotion and its genetic dissection, with advantages for disease research and therapeutic drug discovery. Here, we review the increasing evidence that invertebrates display some form of emotion, discuss the various methods used for assessing emotions in invertebrates and consider what can be garnered from further emotion research on invertebrates in terms of the evolution and underlying neural basis of emotion in a comparative context.
直到最近，无脊椎动物是否可能表现出情感仍是未知的。传统上，许多人都摒弃了这种可能性，因为情感常常是参照人类主观体验来定义的，而且无脊椎动物通常被认为不具备拥有这种复杂能力所需的神经条件。然而，在人类和其他脊椎动物中，情感被理解为多方面的大脑状态，包括可分离的主观、认知、行为和生理成分。此外，越来越多的文献正在为无脊椎动物令人印象深刻的认知能力和行为灵活性提供证据。与此同时，在过去几年里，一些研究将评估人类和其他动物情感的方法应用于无脊椎动物，得出了有趣的结果。海蛞蝓、蜜蜂、小龙虾、蜗牛、螃蟹、苍蝇和蚂蚁都已被证明表现出各种认知、行为和/或生理现象，这些现象表明其内部状态类似于我们所认为的情感。鉴于许多无脊椎动物的神经结构有限，以及无脊椎动物研究中可用的强大工具，这些结果为揭示情感背后的神经机制提供了新机会，并为情感的药理学操纵及其基因剖析开辟了新途径，对疾病研究和治疗药物发现具有重要意义。在此，我们综述了越来越多的证据表明无脊椎动物表现出某种形式的情感，讨论了用于评估无脊椎动物情感的各种方法，并思考在比较背景下，从对无脊椎动物的进一步情感研究中可以获得有关情感进化及其潜在神经基础的哪些信息。
