Katherine J. Wu reports:

Seeing someone else suffer a big disappointment can have a pretty damaging effect on your own morale. That’s definitely the case with people—and it might be true for ravens, too.

New research suggests that, like humans and many other mammals, common ravens (Corvus corax) can read and internalize the emotional states of others. In the study, published today in the journal PNAS, ravens watch their friends grapple with a frustrating task in which they’re denied a tasty treat. Though the onlookers aren’t deprived of anything, they then seem to mirror their partners’ discontent, and start behaving pessimistically themselves.

Unlike people, ravens can’t speak freely about their emotional distress. But these results hint at the tantalizing possibility that humans aren’t alone in their interconnectedness, and could provide early evidence of something akin to empathy in birds.

“This paper is a tremendous step forward in being able to understand the evolutionary roots of empathy,” says Kaeli Swift, an animal behaviorist and corvid expert at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “I think it would be too far to say that [this paper shows] ravens are empathetic…but this work could be foundational in eventually arriving at that conclusion.” [Continue reading…]