Empathy is an automatic, unconscious response that causes the observer to experience emotions similar to those that they perceive are experienced by others.

This model states that perception of someone’s emotional state activates a similar state in the observer. The Perception-Action Model (PAM) of empathy provides a basis for understanding vicarious facial expressions. Empathy of members of the general public impacts their attitudes towards animal use. For example, farmer empathy affects attitudes towards animals, and in turn affects the welfare of animals in their care. Empathy shapes the way humans view and care for animals. Empathy is expressed towards other humans, and also to non-human animals, through a variety of physiological and behavioural responses. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Įmpathy has long been known to play a role in interpersonal relationships. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data are available as supplementary information.įunding: This study was funded by a Discovery grant (RGPIN-2016-04620) from Canada’s Natural Science and Engineering Research Council to D.M.W. Received: JAccepted: FebruPublished: March 1, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Ly, Weary. PLoS ONE 16(3):Įditor: Kirk Warren Brown, Virginia Commonwealth University, UNITED STATES These results indicate that facial expressions can be used to assess human-animal empathy.Ĭitation: Ly LH, Weary DM (2021) Facial expression in humans as a measure of empathy towards farm animals in pain. Both the self-reported and facial measures varied with species and procedure witnessed. Participants who reported more intense negative responses also showed stronger facial expressions (slope ± SE = 0.4 ± 0.04). Participants showed more intense facial expressions while viewing painful procedures versus control procedures (mean ± SE Likert 2.4 ± 0.08 versus 0.6 ± 0.17). Videos of the participants (watching the animals) were scored for intensity of unpleasantness of the participants’ facial expression (also on an 11-point Likert scale) by a trained observer who was blind to treatment. Participants provided their subjective rating of the intensity of 5 negative emotions (pain, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) on an 11-point Likert scale. disbudding, castration, tail docking) and control videos (e.g. Participants ( n = 30) were asked to watch publicly sourced video clips of cows and pigs undergoing common management procedures (e.g. Here we provide the first evidence that this measure can also be used to assess human empathetic responses towards farm animals, showing that facial expressions respond reliably when participants view videos of farm animals undergoing painful procedures. Viewing other humans in pain elicits facial expressions indicative of empathy. Facial expressions provide a quantifiable measure of emotional response that may be less susceptible to social desirability bias and other issues associated with self-report. People often express concern for the welfare of farm animals, but research on this topic has relied upon self-report.

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