Think You Can Read Animal Emotions at the Zoo? Think Again

Have you ever been to a zoo and thought that the animals looked sad? Or perhaps you’ve visited a wildlife park and felt that the animals were chilled and content? Humans are pretty good at judging how other humans feel, at least some of the time. But our ability to accurately pinpoint emotions in other species is open to question.

This is an important subject because millions of animals are in our care worldwide, and their welfare depends on our ability to tell how they are feeling. A new study has investigated the human ability to recognize the emotional state of some zoo animals, and the results will probably surprise you.

Studying Animal Emotions

The study of animal emotions is nothing new. Charles Darwin published a book on the subject in 1872, and since then, many other scientists have investigated it. The challenge faced by all research in this area is how to define animal emotions. As animals can never tell us how they are feeling, we have to resort to trying to find objective measurements of their emotional state.

How Can Animal Emotions Be Measured?

An accepted approach to the assessment of animal emotions is to record emotional states based on two dimensions. The first is the valence of the emotion. Put simply, this is how positive or negative the emotion is. For example, happiness is a positive emotion, but fear is negative. Second is the level of arousal, which ranges from low to high. This has proved more successful than trying to pinpoint individual emotions such as joy and sadness.

By using a sliding scale of both valence and arousal, scientists can compare factors that affect our ability to recognize aspects of emotional experience.

How Good Are Humans at Recognizing Human and Animal Emotions?

Using this methodology, researchers found that we are faster and more accurate at recognizing negative emotions than positive ones in our fellow humans. In contrast, we seem to be better at recognizing positive states in domestic dogs (such as joy) than negative ones (such as fear).

When it comes to arousal, high arousal seems to be easier for us to recognize. This has proved true for all vertebrates studied so far, from amphibians to mammals. We also seem to be better at recognizing arousal than valence, and are better at reading emotions in domestic animals than in wild ones. However, very few studies have focused on wild captive species.

Interestingly, some studies have indicated that young women are better at accurately identifying animal emotional states than men or older women.

Assessing Zoo Vibes

So, how good are humans at assessing an animal’s emotional state in a zoo setting? A group of researchers from the University of Helsinki set out to answer this question, and their findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports in December 2025.

They showed the human subjects video footage of Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus), Siberian tigers (Panthera tigris altaica), and Turkmenian markhors (Capra falconeri heptneri) recorded in a zoo setting. The videos were muted, so the participants were basing their opinions solely on visual signals. 

The macaques were chosen because they are an evolutionarily close relative of ours. Tigers were chosen because of their similarity to domestic cats. Markhors were chosen as a species that not many people would have had experience with.  

The human subjects were asked to recognize the emotional states of the animals in terms of valence and arousal with little contextual information. In all, 5306 valence and arousal rating scores were obtained from 1082 respondents. Within the subject group, 63 percent of the respondents self-identified as women and 35 percent as men. Most respondents were in the age group 31–45 years.

An independent expert then analyzed the clips based on known emotional indicators for positive and negative valence and low and high arousal for each species. The expert was also given contextual information. They assessed whether the respondents had correctly identified the emotional states of the animals.

Getting Zoo Emotions Right and Wrong

Overall, the study found that people were better at recognizing arousal than valence, which agrees with previous research. Put simply, we are better at detecting the intensity of the emotion rather than whether it’s a good or bad one!

That said, the humans were better at recognizing negative emotions than positive ones. It would make sense that we would be better at detecting emotions such as anger and fear in other species because we probably needed that to survive. You are more likely to be attacked by an angry animal than a happy one! Scientists call this the ‘negativity bias’.

Overall, the human subjects were better at identifying calm, low-aroused emotional states than high-aroused ones. However, this may be because there were readily identifiable behaviors in the clips, such as grooming.

Tigers Are Difficult to Read

Don’t try to play poker with a tiger because we are not very good at reading them! Of the three species studied, their valence was the least accurately detected. It was so bad, in fact, that they were actively misunderstood a lot of the time. Previous studies have assessed how good zookeepers were at evaluating tigers’ emotions, and these have also found that they were not very good.

You would imagine that owners of domestic cats would be better at this, as they have experience in interpreting feline emotions. However, that proved not to be the case. Cat owners are no better at reading the emotions of big cats than anyone else. It’s also important to bear in mind that cat owners are not always as good at interpreting their pet’s feelings as they think they are. Unfortunately, more research is needed to establish whether cat owners are truly skilled at interpreting cat moods.

Interestingly, a video clip of a tiger lying on its back and baring its teeth was interpreted by nearly 90 percent of the study participants as being a positive emotional state. In fact, this tiger was in an aroused negative state and was in the middle of an aggressive confrontation with a second tiger. To be fair to the subjects, they never got to see the end of the clip where the second tiger comes into view. This probably led to them interpreting the lying down posture as playful. The fact that we view tigers as powerful animals also likely makes us reluctant to view their emotional state as fearful.

Monkey Emotions Are Easier to Judge

We should not be surprised that we can judge monkey emotions the best because we are, after all, a relative of theirs. We have a shared evolutionary origin of emotional expressions, and this may even stretch to facial structures and movements.

However, it is not as simple as that. Previous research has found that we frequently mix up positive and negative emotional states in Barbary macaques. Also, despite the fact that we are related to chimpanzees, a ‘grin’ means very different things to us. In humans, it is a positive sign, but a bared-teeth grin in chimpanzees signifies fear.

Who Is Best at Detecting Zoo Animal Emotions?

Pet owners pride themselves on being able to tell what their furry friends are feeling. However, in this study, they were no better at detecting either valence or arousal in zoo animals. Men and women were similar in their ability to detect valence, but women were slightly more accurate when it came to arousal. The difference, however, was very small. There were also no significant differences between the abilities of different age groups.

Why This Research Matters

The welfare of captive animals in zoos should be a priority. This research provides a basis on which staff education can be designed. Training will enhance the ability of zoo staff to accurately assess the emotions of the animals in their care. These findings are also useful for challenging commonly held misconceptions about animal emotional states. Just as importantly, our ability to understand animals better should improve our attitudes and behaviors towards them.