The Nature of the Beast: How Emotions Guide Us

A pioneering neuroscientist offers a new way of understanding how emotions drive behavior

Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they’re angry? You can’t very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven’t been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness.

In The Natu...