Assessing the expression of emotional states across wild elephant populations using body signals

我们通常很擅长读懂别人的情绪，但我们发现这对动物来说就比较困难了，尤其是那些不分享我们日常生活的野生动物。然而，能够读懂野生动物的情绪可能是非常有益的，无论是对我们理解情感表达的进化，还是帮助与动物一起生活或工作的人更好地理解动物的感受（从而更准确地评估动物可能构成的威胁程度）。这在非洲部分地区尤其有用，在那里，人象之间的负面互动日益成为社会和生态问题。就像人类一样，非洲象用许多手势和身体姿势来表达自己，这表明了它们的情绪状态。这个项目的目的是利用这些信号的照片和视频来确定一个容易识别野生非洲象情绪状态的过程——一个“大象身体姿势情绪评估工具”。这个工具可以很容易地评估和比较不同大象种群的身体姿势及其相关的情绪状态。通过这样做，我们可以研究生活经历，例如历史上的扑杀或偷猎，以及其他环境因素如何影响野生大象的情感表达和健康，以一种省时、非侵入性和成本效益的方式。该工具还将被用作教育资源，并调查基于身体姿势的评估是否能提高人们对大象情绪状态的理解。大象能够很容易地识别压力，潜在的更危险，这将改善大象和人类的福祉。

We are generally good at reading other people's emotions, but we find this more difficult for animals,especially wild animals that do not share our everyday lives. Yet, being able to read the emotions of wildanimals could be extremely beneficial, both for our understanding of evolution of emotional expression,and in helping people who live or work alongside animals to better understand what the animal is feeling(and therefore more accurately assess how much of a threat the animal may be posing). This could beespecially useful in parts of Africa where negative human-elephant interactions are a growing social andecological concern. Much like humans, African elephants express themselves using many gestures andbody postures, which signal their emotional states. This project aims to use photographs and videos ofthese signals to formalise a process for easily identifying emotional states in wild African elephants - an"elephant body posture emotional assessment tool". This tool will make it possible to easily assess andcompare body postures and their related emotional states across different elephant populations. Bydoing this, we can study how life experiences, e.g., historic culling or poaching, and other environmentalfactors might impact wild elephant emotional expression and wellbeing, in a time-efficient, non-invasive,and cost-effective way. The tool will also be used as an educational resource and to investigate whetherbody posture-based assessments improve people's understanding of elephants' emotional states. Beingable to easily identify stressed, potentially more dangerous, elephants would improve the wellbeing ofelephants and humans alike.