The assumption that affective empathy is a personal trait, suggests that people affected by human emotions/suffering are also affected by those of other animals. Facial expression recognition plays an important role in social species, facilitating a fast understanding of others' feelings and intentions and is thus crucial to assessing empathy across species, especially if combined with measures of physiological response (as a proxy for affective empathy). In this study we investigated human recognition and physiological activation when watching 4 min video clips of human, chimpanzee and dog emotional facial expressions depicting these species in each of four different emotional contexts, aiming to inspect consistency of responses and which stimuli affected most the various empathy measures, in a within subject 3(species)X4(emotional conditions) experimental design. Participants were rated on the number of correct appraisals of facial expressions, skin conductance responses (SCR), self-reports of arousal and valence (using Bradley & Lang's SAM scales). There were significant differences between conditions in the participants' correct appraisals, self-assessed arousal and valence, but not SCR. No sex differences were found. People recognized best dog and human expressions of positive valence, dog and human stimuli exert higher influence on people's self-rated state valence and arousal. This may indicate that familiarity could be a key factor in recognition and affective empathy.

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This publication is associated with the following record:

• Empathy towards humans and other animals: not all non-humans fare the same.