ABSTRACTS RECEIVED (13/04/2009; arranged according to the authors’ alphabetical list)

 

 

 

Ethics as a Cognitive Skill: Framing its Evolutionary Dimension

 

Matteo Borri

 

Université de Genève - Suisse & Università di Bari – Italia; e-mail: Matteo.Borri@unige.ch, mborri@gmail.com

 

The work of Charles Darwin, especially The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, helped to develop a research perspective on psychic abilities based on biology. His remarks on emotions were a spur to further research. The reception of Darwin’s ideas in Florence developed around Paolo Mantegazza and his school.

From the late 19th century on, the biological perspective that considered emotions as an innate system based on instinctual physiological activities, was replaced by a neuroscientific approach. From the 1950 on there have been many studies on neuronal processes that mediate human behaviour, based also on new instruments of inquiry.

The current perspective of cognitive neurosciences, that focuses on a high integration of disciplines (Kandell, 2007), allows a specific analysis of Darwin’s proposals. The debate on biological conditions as the basis for the development of the Ethical Thinking raises questions. Can Ethical Thinking be treated as a cognitive self-consistent domain or as related to emotional structures? What are Its structural and linguistic characteristics?

Evolutionary research within the cognitive linguistic field highlights a complex relation between a common domain and its different linguistic abilities.

The psychological analysis of such complexity examined through tests such as 5VM (Boschi,1986) is linked here to the structural and functional hypothesis of Edelman’s Theory on Neuronal Group Selection (Edelman, 1995).

Psychological research in evolutionary age confirms the evolutionary perspective (Bigozzi, 2007). These results show an evolution in the conscious activation of critical/evaluative thoughts and increase current debates on Ethics as a cognitive skill

With “The Expression of the Emotions in Animals and Man” Charles Darwin studied emotions from a biological and evolutionary perspective. Since 1871, one of the topics regarding human behavior has been the connection between evolution and neurological issues. Altruistic behavior has given rise to questions on both functions in the brain (i.e. cognitive skills), and structures of the brain (i.e. neural architecture). In order to analyze this behavior, a conceptual frame will merge Neuronal Group Selection theory with the actual research on cognitive and ethical factors during the evolutive age.

 

 

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Emotion, evolution and neuroethics of addiction

Stefano Canali

 

Scuola Internazionale di Studi Superiori Avanzati, Trieste – Italia; e-mail: canali@sissa.it

 

The vexing dilemma of whether addiction is best understood as a brain disease or a moral condition and, consequently to what extent an addicted individual is responsible for his or her actions remain a matter of unsettled debate. There is substantial evidence for a disease model of addiction, but the disease model per se does not resolve the question of voluntary control. An emerging and influential perspective on neuroethics is trying to explain addiction on the base of some recent evidence on neurobiology of cognitive control of behavior. It suggests that addicted individuals have substantial impairments in cognitive control of behavior, suffer from loss of cognitive control. However, this account suffers from a cognitive bias that underestimates the affective and emotional dimensions of addiction and overlooks biological and evolutionary determinants of drug use, abuse and addiction. Furthermore, it is not the case that addiction must be either a brain disease or a moral condition. This question is wrong. For a better understanding of these issues, we need to look beyond the sphere of cognition and cognitive neuroscience. Addiction could be understanding both as a brain disease, a biological condition, and a moral fact and we can explain why only by using the perspective of evolutionary affective neuroscience. It is sure that there are failures of cognitive control in addiction; however, affect, emotion, and cognition are not separable in this context. The central feature of decisional impairments in addiction could lie in the domains of feeling and emotion and the affective capacities of the brain. This, for example, could explain why recovery from addiction is not primarily a matter of cognitive problem solving or executive function on the level of thinking and reasoning. Addictive drugs seize mechanisms by which survival-relevant goals, such as food, safety, mating, shape behavior. Survival-relevant goals act as reward, they are desired because they are experienced as pleasurable and as motivating. Brain-reward systems are shaped by evolution. These systems maxime the ability of an organism to obtain reward. This means that they mediate the ability to learn and to make effective comparisons between stimulus and expected rewards. At the same time brain-rewards systems mediate the ability to learn efficient and relatively automatic patterns of actions to obtain rewards. It’s clear that rewarding goals for humans can vary enormously in complexity, immediacy, and motivational force, ranging from a pure biological goals like food, to learned and cultural goals like well-presented food to listening a favorite musician at a concert, or to reading a good book. But emotions, pleasure, hedonic response to a reward are, in any case, the determinants by which experience shape behavior. For these reasons a neuroethical approach to the addiction cannot do without an evolutionary perspective and affective neuroscience. Affective neuroscience brings the notion of affect to the understanding of loss of control. Affects are subjectively experienced emotions, positive and negative feelings. Affects are mental representations, mediated by emotional brain, that encode and reflect biological motivations, goals and value of organism. Decision-making depends on these kind of emotions. They give value to internal and environmental stimulus and in this way enable the selection for options to guide choice. Thus, emotions, affects, are the dimension where evolutionary mechanisms make morality enters the picture. Usurping brain reward systems, addictive drugs alter the manner in which feelings direct the organism. Consequently, addiction could be explained as a pathology of the evaluative capacities of the brain that govern the generation and operation of affects. These alterations inevitably have cognitive side-effects, but evidently addiction is not primarily a cognitive disorder. Emotions are always involved in drugs use, abuse and addiction. Emotions and their corresponding affects at the same time start or are consequences of thinking and behavior. They are the bridge between homeostatic functions, biological motivation and cognition. Thus in an individual they connect nature with nurture, and they are the middle dimensions where neuropharmacology of drugs, brain functions, value, rationality and will can meet and modulate each other. An evolutionary and affective neuroscience informed framework seems more appropriate than the prevailing cognitive and neurocomputational approach to neuroethics of addiction. I will explore the principal theorethical aspects of this approach and I will briefly examine its possible implications for drug abuse policy making and for public engagement on neuroscience and addiction research.

 

 

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Contributions of Ethology to some emergent perspectives in anthropological and ethical circle

 

Marco Celentano

 

Università di Cassino – Italia; e-mail: marcelen@unina.it

 

The Darwin’s book Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) is the first ethological essay founded on the Theory of natural selection. In it, at least ideally, Darwin’s cultural revolution had come full circle, with the framing within a genealogical enquiry, and within the theory of natural selection, of that domain that traditional culture had strenuously attempted to defend, and would have continued to defend, from every possible naturalistic intrusion: the research on the origins, motivations and meanings of human behaviours.

Since the early diffusion of Darwinian theory (1859), and since the earliest elicted reactions, the possibility of instructing a wide comparative and genealogical investigation, on the origins and historical transformations of human behaviours and mental faculties, free of any dogmatic loyalty to traditionally rooted beliefs. At the present Time, with the developments of comparative, human, cognitive and cultural ethology, and of the sociobiology and ecology of behaviour to, these crucial points of the Darwinian revolution came to ripeness. But the outcomes of such a massive change still nowadays appear at least for what concerns their anthropological, social and ethical meaning a open question. These developments still seems suspended or divided between radically innovative perspectives, in which questioning, through the comparative investigation on phylogeny, ontogeny and sociogenesis of the behavioural and cognitive forms, an on animal cultures and minds, the traditional bases of the disciplinary distinction between life sciences and humanities, and the tendency to a renewed, refined and  so “dangerously […] Social Darwinism” (Hirsch J. 1976) and to a gene-centric perspective (de Waal F. 1996; 2001) in human ethology, sociobiology, genetics of behaviour and evolutionary psychology. Comparative, cognitive and cultural ethology fully demonstrated the inadequacy of traditionally representation of “human specificity” and of its alter ego, “the animal. The classical image of “animal” (be it amoeba, earthworm, chimp) was a mere negative to the human, a index of everything that, according to the tradition, is present in ourselves and missing in other creatures: the being deprived of history, thought, knowledge, culture, language. The achievements of the scholarship on animal societies, animal cultures and “animal minds” radically challenge the grounds and boundaries of traditional anthropological conceptions, highlighting the inadequacy of that prejudice, deeply rooted in our culture, according to which “history”, knowledge, thought and culture are exclusive prerogatives of the human being. These discoveries, it is evident, don’t imply a annulment of the “human specificity” (every spcies is from the ethological point o view unique), but its new definition. In prospect of a evolutionary, genealogical or Darwinist anthropology, the Primatology, human ethology, molecular  anthropology and archaeology worked combined, confronting hypothesis, methods and results, to expand a comparative approach to the study of all the extint and living “Anthropoid”, “Hominoid” and “Hominin” species, societies and cultures. The philosophical anthropology appear, on the contrary, at lest in Italy, as regard to this problem, very late, tied to the traditional definition of Anthropology as “science of man”, in strictu sensu of  Modern Human, and to a obsolete idea of the “Animal” in general as mere “instinctiveness”. An anthropological perspective incapable of framing human history and human mind in comparison with all the existed and existing societies of “higher primates”; of taking into due consideration the complexity and variety of the individual performances of which “Anthropoid”, “Hominoid” and “Hominin” species are capable, or removing the unquestionable fact that thought and culture do exist outside our own species, will keep feeding that mythology that ontological separatism of which now more than ever we need to free ourselves, for theoretical as well as practical reasons. If it is necessary to reconsider and revolutionize the philosophical anthropology, and to free it from ancient idealistic and anthropocentric prejudices (and the results of ethological research can be instrumental in this direction), not less necessary seems to be a critical reform of human ethology, an emancipation of the discipline from that programmatically reductionist and determinist outlook that marked its early days, XX Century heritage of a “conservative” interpretation of Darwinism, rooted in the Positivistic and ultra-liberal culture of the late 1800s.

 

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The methodological parable of William D. Hamilton and the bad nature of Iago: history, epistemological aspects and critical proposals concerning the maleficence

 

Emanuele Coco

 

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris - France & Università di Catania - Italia; e-mail: emanuele.coco@unict.it

 

 

Between 1963 and 1964 William Donald Hamilton (1936-2000) published two articles which revolutionized the way of thinking social behaviour and its relationship with genetic inheritance. In the second of these articles he elaborated a mathematical model capable of valuating the destiny of a gene for altruistic behaviour. Few years later, basing on theoretical principles of Hamilton’s articles, Richard Dawkins wrote the lucky book “The Selfish Gene”, and he spoke about Hamilton, following his premature death in 2000, such as “something nearest Darwin that XX Century could offer”. The death of Hamilton induced some of his colleagues and institutions to create an archive with all his manuscripts at the Department of Manuscripts in the London British Library, still in cataloguing. The four cycles of unpublished lectures which I fund in this archive, probably redacted between 1965 and 1975, give the possibility to follow the methodological parabola of Hamilton under an historical and epistemological perspective. The change of perspective adopted by Hamilton in 1970’s (Hamilton 1970, 1972, 1975) don’t regarded the contraposition between group/individual, such as normally believed, but the possibility of using mathematical models more powerful for including some elements hard to be represented in numerical way. Thanks to some new mathematical instruments he could affront a question full of theoretical implications: the eventual success of “iniquity” between organism under natural selection. The history of evolutionary ideas dedicated to social behaviours – recently published in a book under the title “Egoisti, malvagi e generosi (Coco 2008) – give the possibility to advance some hypotheses about the other side of the dilemma which accompanied altruism until Hamilton. In fact, if the dilemma of altruism has been resolved (answering to the question: how can an organism that compromise his reproductive success helping others, maintains himself stable in time?), another question rest open: why there are evil individuals?         

 

 

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Theories of cooperation

 

Antonello La Vergata

 

 Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia – Italia; e-mail: alavergata@unimore.it

 

A variety of moral and social applications was derived from Darwin’s theory of natural selection: they included justifications of cooperation and altruism as well as doctrines of individualism and competition. The Descent of Man contained an ambivalent moral message: on the one hand Darwin argued that there should be an open competition within society which would ensure progress by means of the triumph of the fittest, on the other hand he allowed for an important role for sympathy and the social instincts in the evolution of man’s moral and intellectual faculties. In order to explain the spread of altruistic feelings, he added a sort of group selection to the “Lamarckian” belief in habit-inheritance. With few exceptions, doctrines of cooperation in the second half of the Nineteenth century were based on Lamarckian principles, and belittled natural selection, or rejected it altogether. This was particularly evident in France and Russia. In France, solidarité became a sort of official political creed of the Troixième République. Most Russian thinkers and naturalists hated Malthus and the Malthusian aspect of Darwinism. Kropotkin is the most well-known supporter of «mutual aid». He was a Lamarckian and a strong believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and argued that the foundations of morals lay in nature: what bourgeois thinkers had made of Darwin was «abominable», he said. But Germany, too, was a favourable environment for ideas of cooperation, probably as a consequence of the strength of the socialist party. Karl Kautsky, for instance, was a Darwinian before he became a Marxist. He based his ethical theory on the importance of the social instincts that humans had inherited from animals. Ironically, some Darwinians helped strengthen suspicions about natural selection by depicting non-human nature as a «gladiatorial show», as T.H. Huxley’s did in his famous 1893 lecture on Evolution and Ethics. He opposed the «ethical process» on which human society is based to the «cosmical process», that is evolution by the universal struggle for existence, which fills nature with cruelty and suffering. But, as Huxley’s target, Herbert Spencer (under attack for his «savage individualism»), put it, if the ethical process is not a product of the cosmical process, what is it a product of? We should not forget that Spencer, the very man who is generally described as the arch-social Darwinist, predicted a reconciliation of egoism and altruism in the final stage of the evolution of society. Needless to say, Spencer was a firm believer in what he called «use-inheritance». Being Lamarckian in spirit, the doctrines of cooperation were seriously threatened by Weismann’s neo-Darwinism. Both Kropotkin and Spencer attacked Weismann’s theory of the «omnipotence of natural selection». Both were inspired in this by their political leanings, although these were very different from each other’s. Many sociologists, too, went into dismay: what would become of human efforts towards progress, they asked, if Weismann was right, and every generation had to start anew? If social and cultural evolution could not be based on the same mechanism as biological evolution, sociology was no science at all, they feared. The distrust for the ideas of struggle for life and natural selection increased after World War I, when it became frequent, especially in the United States, to charge Darwinism as such for the «Darwinian craze» that had unleashed German militarism and led to the catastrophe. Many American biologists turned away from natural selection and the struggle for life towards more organicist or holistic approaches. And a gap between traditional disciplines of natural history and genetics opened up, which was broadened even further, on the one hand, by the extreme selectionism of what has been called «mainstream eugenics», and, on the other, by the development of cultural anthropology as an autonomous discipline. Such was the situation until the end of World War Two. It has affected negatively the relationhips between evolutionary biology and the human sciences until recently. It has also marred attempts towards the naturalization of ethics.

 

 

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Far away, so close: the Darwinian donation to comparative psychology

 

Simone Macrì, Francesca Zoratto, Igor Branchi e Enrico Alleva

 

 Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Roma – Italia; e-mail: simone.macri@iss.it

 

Everyday reading of newspapers’ scientific sections indirectly reveals how the theory of evolution and his author, Charles Darwin, still influence the progress of scientific knowledge and its interface with the general public. Specifically, anytime a ‘mentally-disturbed-like mouse’ originates in a lab to help disclosing pathogenetic mechanisms or novel therapies for psychiatric disorders, it is assumed that a given emotional phenotype observed in laboratory animals corresponds to an isomorphic phenotype observed in human patients. Thus, the cross-specific preservation of traits is not confined to the morphological realm, but also extends to the emotional domain. This simple concept constitutes the cornerstone upon which comparative psychology – hereon defined as the cross-specific comparison of mental traits – has been built. Over the last decades, many studies have been conducted based on the assumption that laboratory mammals (rodents and non-human primates in particular) are capable of experiencing and displaying typically human emotions like fear, anxiety, sadness, depression and many others. During our presentation we will briefly outline few of the pivotal studies that shaped our current understanding of comparative psychology and then describe the state-of-the-art in the field of animal models of emotional disturbances. First, the original studies demonstrating the existence of simple forms of mental processing in mammals will be discussed. Additionally, we will describe the fundamental contribution that the controversial studies conducted on ‘depressed’ macaque monkeys – reared under conditions of maternal deprivation – have yielded to the present understanding of the pathological mechanisms of human depression. Specifically, these studies will be discussed with respect to their value in informing animal models of human psychiatric disorders and to their limitations in the selection of the independent variables adopted to induce a ‘depressive’ phenotype in primates. We will also propose that, in order to refine animal models of human disorders, the relevance of the environmental / biological context as an integral part of the pathological process should be considered. Just as complex human biological phenomena, such as psychiatric disorders, can be defined only within a specific context (e.g. life events, social environment), so also should contextual features be rigorously considered when other mammals are studied as model species. Under these circumstances, the eco-ethological approach, which takes into account the environment and the species-specific behavioural repertoire, may constitute a promising view whereby aetiological factors and pathological symptoms are embedded within their context.

 

 

 

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How runaway social selection shapes human capacities for genuine altruism

 

Randolph M. Nesse

 

 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan – U.S.A.; e-mail: http://nesse.us

 

The discovery that selection works mainly at the level of the gene created a crisis in moral identity for humans.  This crisis persists despite recognition of the importance of kin selection, reciprocity, and reputation effects.  Genuine altruism seems inexplicable, except as a mistake or a capacity imposed by human social organizations.  Nonetheless, it is easy to observe altruistic acts with no likely payoff, and even easier to experience wrenching private guilt at secret transgressions. Ideas developed by Mary Jane West-Eberhard in the late 1970s offer a possible solution. She observed that just as extreme traits could be shaped by sexual selection because of the advantages of being chosen as a mate, runaway social selection could shape extreme social traits because of the benefits of being chosen as a relationship partner.  Runaway social selection can explain the emotions that make love and friendship possible.  Furthermore, it explains how tendencies to care enormously about other’s opinions, and capacities for theory of mind and empathy, would be selected for; individuals with such emotions had more and better relationships, which increased fitness.  Like sexually selected traits, these emotions also have big costs, especially social anxiety and low self-esteem.  Other species do not get comparable benefits from long term committed relationships with non-kin, so it is not surprising that these capacities are likely only found in humans.  They are, however, by no means universal.  Strong genetic and cultural variability makes it clear that there is no singular human nature, but wide variations that require explanation.  These variations offer possible explanations for pathological conditions such as psychopathy and obsessive compulsive personality.  Recognizing the origins of prosocial human capacities from runaway social selection can resolve the crisis of human moral identity, and it should help us to explain the prevalence of certain pathological conditions.

 

 

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The evolution of altruism: a case for multilevel selection and exaptation

 

Telmo Pievani

 

Università di Milano Bicocca – Italia; e-mai: telmo.pievani@unimib.it

 

In recent papers (among others, D.S. Wilson, E.O. Wilson, 2007) we had a confirmation that the two standard solutions for the apparent paradox of the evolution of altruism and pro-social behaviours - Kin Selection, leaving unsolved the question of population structure, and Group Selection, which has yet significant explanatory weaknesses – are consistent with each other. The result is a possible explanation of the ambiguity between the deep attitude to cooperation inside the groups and the capability to organize hostility among groups (Bowles, 2008). Nevertheless, these models undervalue the effective role of a “multilevel” evolution and remain strongly engaged with a gene-centred interpretation of evolutionary dynamics that seems to lose its explanatory power when applied to group-living species showing unconditioned forms of altruism and pro-social feelings in groups of non-relatives, even more when cultural evolution enters the process. In order to avoid some opposite “cultural discontinuity” hypotheses, and following a “pluralistic” approach of continuity suggested by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (concluding remarks), we underline here the role that the mechanism of “functional cooptation”, or “exaptation” (Gould, Vrba, 1982; Gould, 2002) – anticipated by Darwin in the sixth edition of the Origin of Species in 1872, the same year of the first edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals - could have in order to find a more satisfying explanation of the origins of unselfishness, free or reciprocal, in group-living animals and in cultural species. 

 

 

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Must naturalism be nihilistic?

 

Alexander Rosenberg 

 

 Duke University, Durham, North Carolina - U.S.A.; e-mail: alexrose@duke.edu

 

I show that it is difficult for a Darwinian view of morality to adopt any other than a nihilistic view, one which I distinguish from relativism, or skepticism about moral norms. I examine alternative attempts to avoid this conclusion and then I suggest that its undesired character may be mitigated by important findings from Darwin and others about the nature of human moral commitments.

 

 

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The evolutionary origin of multimodal synchronisation in emotional expression

Klaus R. Scherrer

 

 Université de Genève - Suisse; e-mail: klaus.scherrer@unige.ch

 

First, the nature and functions of emotions will be described, with an emphasis on the dynamic nature of emotion episodes and the synchronization of response channels in the interest of optimal adaptation to relevant events. This constitutive feature of emotions is then linked to the evolutionary origin of emotional expressions by demonstrating that it is an essential aspect of spontaneous affect bursts in animals and humans. An appropriate place will be given to Darwin's pioneering comments on these issues. Finally, the significance of this mechanism to emotional expression and perception in speech communication and music is explored.

 

 

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The ABCs of Group Selection

 

Elliot Sober 

 

 University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin - U.S.A.; e-mail: ersober@wisc.edu

 

In the Origin of Species, Darwin discusses the existence of sterile castes in social insects and the barbed stinger of the honeybee as examples of traits that evolved because they are good for the group.  He says the same thing about human morality in his later book, The Descent of Man. I will use these examples of Darwin's to clarify the concept of group selection. Darwin did not clearly distinguish family selection, kin selection, and group selection, but the examples he discusses help one understand how these modern concepts are related to each other.

 

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Darwinian Psychiatry and the evolutionary function of emotions

 

Alfonso Troisi 

 

 Università di Roma Tor Vergata – Italia; e-mail: alfonso.troisi@uniroma2.it

The aim of this presentation is to argue that evolutionary theory can and should serve as the general theoretical framework for explaining normal and pathological emotional reactions. As currently understood, mental illness has relatively little to do with the view that human mind and behavior are products of evolutionary processes and that some psychological and behavioral traits may be adaptive while others are not. Instead, psychiatry is deeply immersed in activities such as the description of signs and symptoms, the classification of disorders, the identification of pathogenetic mechanisms, and the development of new therapeutic strategies. It is not that these activities are unimportant; rather, there is a price to pay when they monopolize psychiatric research and clinical practice to the exclusion of a theory dealing with why people behave as they do. Human beings, like all other organisms, have been designed by natural selection to strive for the achievement of specific goals or experiences, such as acquiring resources, making friends, developing social support networks, having high status, attracting a mate, and establishing intimate relationships. In the ancestral environment, the achievement of these goals correlated consistently with a gene-transmitting advantage (i.e., increased fitness). The achievement of adaptive goals often depends on a long chain of events and requires the implementation of complex behavioral strategies. In each animal species, a variety of psychobiological mechanisms ensure the correct execution of each step of these behavioral strategies. In species characterized by a highly stereotyped behavioral repertoire, the implementation of adaptive behaviors can occur through a coordinated sequence of “fixed action patterns”, without any correlates in terms of emotional experience. However, in species characterized by greater behavioral plasticity and flexibility, natural selection has favored the evolution of brain reward systems as a means to guide behavioral choices and to address the individual toward the achievement of biological goals. In humans, brain reward systems and the positive emotions originating from their stimulation play a central role in controlling the correct execution of adaptive behaviors. The capacity to experience mental pleasure and mental pain helps the individual to pursue goals relevant to biological adaptation and to avoid maladaptive situations. In other words, emotions have evolved to provide information about costs and benefits of past, present, and future behavior. Under minimally adaptive circumstances, individuals experience mental suffering (e.g., depression) that functions as a warning system that one’s goal seeking efforts are failing. Unpleasant emotions mold subsequent behavior by reducing the likelihood that one will behave in the same way again. Conversely, pleasant emotions associated with adaptive behavior are experienced as beneficial and increase the probability that one will engage in similar behavior in the future. In this context, it is clear why mental pleasure and adaptive behavior are so strictly associated. Clinical psychiatrists have long noted that failing to reach a goal is an especially potent elicitor of emotional travail and negative effect. From an evolutionary psychological perspective, stressful events are associated with a subjective experience of mental pain because emotions function as a source of information about goal achievement. Negative affect (e.g., anxiety and depression) has evolved as an emotional indicator that biological goals have not been or are not being achieved, that is, that one’s fitness has been or is being compromised.

 

 

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From Darwin’s insights on facial expressions to our research on capuchin monkeys

 

Elisabetta Visalberghi¹ e Arianna De Marco²

 

⁽¹⁾ Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, CNR, Roma – Italia; e-mail: elisabetta.visalberghi@istc.cnr.it

 

⁽²⁾ Parco Faunistico Piano dell’Abatino, Rieti – Italia

 

 

In “The Expressions of the emotions in man and in animals” (1872) Charles Darwin describes the facial expressions of several animal species, including pets, farm animals and nonhuman primates. Darwin’s interpretation of the meaning of the facial expressions of monkeys and apes is not always correct possibly because he could not rely on systematic observations of group living individuals. Since then, much more is known about nonhuman primates social behaviour and new methodological approaches to the study of facial expressions have been developed. Although Darwin himself (1872) described some facial expressions of capuchin monkeys, until very recently systematic studies of this South American genus were rather limited. Furthermore, no study has yet compared the visual communication inside the genus Cebus, despite the great social-morphological variability between the eight Cebus species and their large geographical distribution, two factors suggesting that some morphological and functional variation of facial displays may exist. Therefore, we carried out systematic studies aimed (i) to describe the facial displays of tufted capuchins and of white-faced capuchins (Cebus apella and Cebus capucinus, respectively), (ii) to examine their distribution in function of the rank and age/sex classes of sender and receiver, (iii) to investigate their ontogeny and their communicative function (Visalberghi et al, 2006; De Marco & Visalberghi 2007; De Marco et al., 2008). Although both species exhibit the relaxed open-mouth, the open-mouth silent bared-teeth, the lip-smacking, the silent bared-teeth and the open-mouth threat-face, there are some species differences concerning the lip-smacking display and the silent bared-teeth display (performed in a milder form in C. capucinus than in C. apella), and the open-mouth threat-face display (which has a longer average duration in C. capucinus than in C. apella). Furthermore, the scalp-lifting display, e.g. the retraction of the skin of the scalp, the most common display characterizing the proceptive behaviours of C. apella females, has never been observed in C. capucinus. Inside the genus Macaca many studies indicated a co-variation between the social function of some facial displays and the species’ dominance style (Thierry, 2000); for example, the smile can signal submission or affiliation in accordance with species’ gradient of dominance. Our results confirm this co-variation showing that white-faced capuchins (whose dominance style is more relaxed) use the majority of facial displays in an affiliative and/or playful context; only the open-mouth threat-face is associated with aggressive behaviours. Furthermore, white-faced capuchins lack ritualised signals of submission. The silent bared-teeth, that in tufted capuchins signals submission as well as affiliation, is unusual in white-faced capuchins and, when performed, it conveys a positive message.

 

 

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Emotions between medicine and evolutionary biology: an historical overview on the case of Rage and Anger

 

Fabio Zampieri

 

Université de Genève, Institut d'Histoire de la Médecine et de la Santé.; e-mail: fabiozampieri@hotmail.com

 

 

Emotions have been at the centre of medical reflection on men from the beginning of European culture. The more complex theory of emotion was elaborated by the system of four Temperaments, based on Humoralism, in which we find the choleric Temperament strictly tied with the emotions of anger and rage. This system resisted in Medicine almost unaltered from Hippocrates (400 b.C.) to the XVIII Century. In this Century, it couldn’t resist in face of the pathological anatomy which caused the end of Humoralism, but it was elaborated again in an anatomical system of Temperament. Here we find the Bilious Temperament characterized by the emotions of anger and rage.

With the advent of Darwinism, Medicine proposed a new system of Temperaments focused on the concept of Biological Constitution (1880-1940). Psychiatrist, psychologist, clinicians, and physiologist contributed to a new definition of emotions and rage referring to some Darwinian concepts. Rage was studied by several researcher in relation to its biological functions.

Today, emotions are studied in evolutionary terms in medicine by Darwinian Medicine and Darwinian Psychiatry. This approach can represent a possible framework for unifying the contemporary analytical approaches which continue to treat separately the problem of anger and rage from a psychological, psychiatric, physiological and neurological points of views.