Review
Version 1
This version is not peer-reviewed
Nuancing 'Emotional' Social Play: Does Play Behaviour Always Underlie a Positive Emotion?
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Version 1
: Received: 16 July 2024 / Approved: 16 July 2024 / Online: 17 July 2024 (02:58:15 CEST)
How to cite: Cordoni, G.; Norscia, I. Nuancing 'Emotional' Social Play: Does Play Behaviour Always Underlie a Positive Emotion?. Preprints 2024, 2024071348. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.1348.v1 Cordoni, G.; Norscia, I. Nuancing 'Emotional' Social Play: Does Play Behaviour Always Underlie a Positive Emotion?. Preprints 2024, 2024071348. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202407.1348.v1
Abstract
This review focuses on social play, a complex behavior that is often difficult to categorize. Although play has been typically associated with positive emotions, emerging research indicates that it relates to various emotional systems, ranging from attachment to conflict. Play oscillates between compe-tition and cooperation, and includes a spectrum in-between, thus quantitatively identifying and demonstrating the emotional nature of play remains challenging. We examined some examples from human and non-human animal studies and explored the emotional and neuro-hormonal systems involved in play. We considered ethological data possibly indicating the emotional states underlying play and we focused on the cooperative and competitive elements of play. We investigated the relationship between play and affiliative/aggressive behaviours, the communicative meaning of play signals (especially primate play faces), and the motor and possibly emotional contagion func-tion of rapid motor mimicry during play. Of all the literature on play, this review selects and com-bines the studies in an innovative way, to present the methods, tools, and evidence indicative of the emotional nature underlying play, which is much more complex than previously thought.
Keywords
cooperation; competition; positive/negative emotions; aggressive play; play signals; rapid motor mimicry
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Behavioral Sciences
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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