Mama's Last Hug Quotes

“Emotions help us navigate a complex world that we don’t fully comprehend. They are our body’s way of ensuring that we do what is best for us.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Emotions evolved, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone. Our species shares many emotions with the other primates because we rely on approximately the same behavioral repertoire.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“I have sat through entire conferences on adolescent human behavior without ever hearing the words power and sex, even though to me they are what teen life is all about. When I bring it up, usually everyone nods and thinks it’s marvelously refreshing how a primatologist looks at the world, then continue on their merry way focusing on self-esteem, body image, emotion regulation, risk-taking, and so on. Given a choice between manifest human behavior and trendy psychological constructs, the social sciences always favor the latter. Yet among teens, there is nothing more obvious than the exploration of sex, the testing of power, and the seeking of structure.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Feelings arise when emotions penetrate our consciousness, and we become aware of them.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Emotions may be slippery, but they are also by far the most salient aspect of our lives. They give meaning to everything.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Emotions often know better than we do what is good for us, even though not everyone is prepared to listen.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“If you now ask me if there is any difference between the human sense of fairness and that of chimpanzees, I really don’t know anymore. There are probably a few differences left, but by and large both species actively seek to equalize outcomes. The great step up compared with the first-order fairness of monkeys, dogs, crows, parrots, and a few other species is that we hominids are better at predicting the future. Humans and apes realize that keeping everything for themselves will create bad feelings. So second-order fairness can be explained from a purely utilitarian perspective. We are fair not because we love each other or are so nice but because we need to keep cooperation flowing. It’s our way of retaining everyone on the team.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Humans diverged from apes about as long ago as African and Asian elephants did from each other, and they are genetically as close or distant. Yet we freely call both of those species “elephants” while obsessing over the specific point at which our own lineage moved from being an ape to being human. We even have special words for this process, such as humanization and anthropogenesis. That there was ever a point in time is a widespread illusion, like trying to find the precise wavelength in the light spectrum at which orange turns red. Our desire for sharp divisions is at odds with evolution’s habit of making extremely smooth transitions.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Human beings evolved to reverberate with the emotional states of others, to the point that we internalize, mostly via our bodies, what is going on with them. This is social connectivity at its best, the glue of all animal and human societies, which guarantees supportive and comforting company.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Nevertheless, scholars keep obsessing about selfish motives, simply because both economics and behaviorism have indoctrinated them that incentives drive everything that animals or humans do. I don’t believe a word of it, though, and a recent ingenious experiment on children drives home why. The German psychologist Felix Warneken investigated how young chimpanzees and children assist human adults. The experimenter was using a tool but dropped it in midjob: would they pick it up? The experimenter’s hands were full: would they open a cupboard for him? Both species did so voluntarily and eagerly, showing that they understood the experimenter’s problem. Once Warneken started to reward the children for their assistance, however, they became less helpful. The rewards, it seems, distracted them from sympathizing with the clumsy experimenter.50 I am trying to figure how this would work in real life. Imagine that every time I offered a helping hand to a colleague or neighbor—keeping a door open or picking up their mail—they stuffed a few dollars in my shirt pocket. I’d be deeply offended, as if all I cared about was money! And it would surely not encourage me to do more for them. I might even start avoiding them as being too manipulative. It is curious to think that human behavior is entirely driven by tangible rewards, given that most of the time rewards are nowhere in sight. What are the rewards for someone who takes care of a spouse with Alzheimer’s? What payoffs does someone derive from sending money to a good cause? Internal rewards (feeling good) may very well come into play, but they work only via the amelioration of the other’s situation. They are nature’s way of making sure that we are other-oriented rather than self-oriented.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist and would-be philosopher, needed such boring heavy tomes full of bloodless characters to make her case. Her main point was that we are unalloyed individualists, but she had to work hard to convince us, because deep down everyone knows that this is not who or what we are. Rather than a description of our species, Rand offered a counterintuitive ideological construct.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“They zoom in on the one visible sex difference that is found throughout the animal kingdom: male movements tend to be more brusque and resolute than those of females, which are more flowing and supple. We don’t even need to see whole bodies to make this distinction. When scientists attached little lights to the arms, legs, and pelvis of people and filmed them walking, they found that these dots alone contain all the information we need to distinguish gender.2 From watching just a few moving white specks against a dark background, subjects can tell right away if they are looking at a man or a woman. The walking pattern even varies with the stage of a woman’s ovulatory cycle.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“We are constantly in touch with our feelings, but the tricky part is that our emotions and our feelings are not the same. We tend to conflate them, but feelings are internal subjective states that, strictly speaking, are known only to those who have them. I know my own feelings, but I don’t know yours, except for what you tell me about them. We communicate about our feelings by language. Emotions, on the other hand, are bodily and mental states— from anger and fear to sexual desire and affection and seeking the upper hand—that drive behavior. Triggered by certain stimuli and accompanied by behavioral changes, emotions are detectable on the outside in facial expression, skin color, vocal timbre, gestures, odor, and so on. Only when the person experiencing these changes becomes aware of them do they become feelings, which are conscious experiences. We show our emotions, but we talk about our feelings.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Taken by themselves, emotions are pretty useless. Simply being fearful doesn't do an organism any good. But if a fearful state prompts an organism to flee, hide, or counterattack, it may well save its life. Emotions evolve, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Emotions infuse everything with meaning and are the main inspiration of cognition, also in our lives.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“The default mode of the human primate is intensely social, as reflected in our favorite activities, from attending sports matches and singing in choirs to partying and socializing.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Our desire for sharp divisions is at odds with evolution’s habit of making extremely smooth transitions.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Reprimanded children sometimes can’t stop smiling, which risks being mistaken for disrespect. All they’re doing, though, is nervously signaling nonhostility. This is why women smile more than men, and why men who smile are often in need of friendly relations. One study explicitly looked at this underdog quality of the smile in pictures taken right before matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The photographs show both fighters defiantly staring at each other. Analysis of a large number of pictures revealed that the fighter with the more intense smile was the one who’d end up losing the fight later that day. The investigators concluded that smiling indicates a lack of physical dominance, and that the fighter who smiles the most is the one most in
need of appeasement.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“When people having their brain scanned watched the hand of another person being mildly shocked, the pain areas in their own brain lit up, showing that they shared the other’s pain. This is typical of empathy. But it happened only if the partner was someone likable, with whom the subject had played a friendly game before the scanning session. On the other hand, if the partner had played unfairly against them before the session, the subjects felt cheated, and seeing the other in pain had less of an effect. The door to empathy had shut. For the women, it was still partially open—they still showed mild empathy. But for the men it closed completely—in fact, seeing the unfair player getting shocked activated the pleasure centers in men’s brains. They had moved from empathy to justice and welcomed the punishment of the other.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Sympathy is action-oriented. It is often rooted in empathy but goes beyond it. Whereas sympathy is by definition positive, empathy doesn’t need to be, especially if the capacity to understand others is turned against them. Small-brained animals, such as sharks and snakes, are probably incapable of doing so intentionally. These animals have excellent abilities to hurt and damage others, but without the slightest idea of their impact. Most “cruelty” in nature is of this kind: cruel in outcome, but not on purpose. The brains of apes, on the other hand, are sufficiently complex to knowingly inflict pain. They can recruit their capacity to understand others in order to torment them.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“But modern warfare is undeniably several steps removed from our species’s aggressive instincts. It is really not the same thing. The decision to go to war is typically made by older men in a capital based on politics, economics, and egos, while younger men are told to do the dirty work. When I look at a marching army, therefore, I don’t necessarily see the aggressive instinct at work. I rather see the herd instinct: thousands of men and women in lockstep, willing to obey orders. I can’t imagine that Napoleon’s soldiers froze to death in Siberia in an angry mood. Nor have I ever heard American Vietnam veterans say that they went over there with rage in their hearts. But alas, the incredibly complex issue of human warfare is still often reduced to that of an aggressive instinct.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Emotions belong as much to the body as to the mind.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“naturalist and anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin asked in 1902: “Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Bartal placed one rat in an enclosure, where it encountered a small transparent container, a bit like a jelly jar. Squeezed inside it was another rat, locked up, wriggling in distress. Not only did the free rat learn how to open a little door to liberate the other, but she was remarkably eager to do so. Never trained on it, she did so spontaneously. Then Bartal challenged her motivation by giving her a choice between two containers, one with chocolate chips—a favorite food that they could easily smell—and another with a trapped companion. The free rat often rescued her companion first, suggesting that reducing her distress counted more than delicious food.47 The empathy of laboratory rats has been tested by presenting them with a companion trapped in a glass container. Responding to the distress of the trapped rat, the free rat makes a purposeful effort to liberate her. This behavior disappears if the free rat is put on a relaxing drug, which dulls her sensitivity to the other’s emotional state.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Whereas sympathy is by definition positive, empathy doesn’t need to be, especially if the capacity to understand others is turned against them.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“At birth, girl babies look longer at faces than do boy babies, who look longer at mechanical toys. Later in life, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of facial expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another’s perspective.32 The same differences have been found in self-report studies of human adults.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“It is often in the little things that we best see evolutionary connections. These connections, by the way, apply to 90 percent of human expressions, from the way a few measly hairs stand on our bodies when we are frightened (goose bumps) to the way men and male chimpanzees slap each other’s backs in exuberance. We can see this forceful contact every spring when the chimps emerge from their building after a long winter. Finally enjoying the grass and sun, they stand around in little groups hooting, embracing, and backslapping.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Feelings happen when emotions bubble to the surface so that we become aware of them. When we are conscious of our emotions, we are able to express them in words and make others aware of them:”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Empathic reactions are always stronger the more we have in common with the other and the closer we feel to them.20”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves