If you spend hours scrolling through cat videos online, there’s a scientific explanation for why that’s a hard habit to kick: A new study has found that watching footage of cute animals can reduce your anxiety, blood pressure and heart rate. The study, led by the University of Leeds in More
Research on dogs has exploded in recent decades. Universities have opened canine cognition labs, and scientists have probed dogs’ intelligence, behavior, biology and skills. Clive Wynne, a psychologist and founder of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, has a new book that walks readers through the growing body of More
When psychologist Hal Herzog‘s son Adam was young, he had a pet mouse named Willie. One day, Willie died. “When he died, we thought it would be a good lesson for the kids in terms of understanding death to have a funeral for him. After all, you know, he was More
On Valentine’s Day, 2018, five months after Hurricane Maria made landfall, Daniel Phillips stood at the edge of a denuded forest on the eastern half of a 38-acre island known as Cayo Santiago, a clipboard in his hand, his eyes on the monkeys. The island sits about a half-mile off More
What can humans learn about ourselves from studying chimpanzees? Primatologist Frans de Waal has spent almost three decades studying the behavior and intelligence of chimpanzees. Now, he’s focused on their emotional lives–and he’s found primates and people aren’t so different in how they react to circumstances and each other. Jeffrey More
APS Fellow Frans B. M. de Waal says that parallels in animal and human behaviors can deepen our understanding of our own emotions. More
