Correctly recognizing and efficiently attending to emotional situations are highly valuable skills for social species such as humans and bonobos, humans' closest living relatives. In the current study, we investigated whether humans perceive a range of emotional situations differently when these involved other humans compared to bonobos. A large group of children and adults participated in an emotion perception task and rated scenes showing either bonobos or humans in situations depicting distressed or aggressive behavior, yawning, scratching, grooming, playing, sex scenes or neutral situations. A new group of people performed a dot-probe task to assess attentional biases toward these materials. The main finding is that humans perceive emotional scenes showing people similarly as emotional scenes of bonobos, a result reflecting a shared evolutionary origin of emotional expressions. Other results show that children interpreted bonobos’ bared teeth displays as a positive signal. This signal is related to the human smile, but is frequently seen in distressed situations, as was the case in the current experiment. Children may still need to learn to use contextual cues when judging an ambiguous expression as positive or negative. Further, the sex scenes were rated very positively, especially by male participants. Even though they rated these more positively than women, their attention was captured similarly, surpassing all other emotion categories. Finally, humans’ attention was captured more by human yawns than by bonobo yawns, which may be related to the highly contagious nature of yawns, especially when shown by close others. The current research adds to earlier work showing morphological, behavioral and genetic parallels between humans and bonobos by showing that their emotional expressions have a common origin too.

对于人类和倭黑猩猩（人类现存的近亲）等社会物种来说，正确识别和有效处理情绪状况是非常有价值的技能。在当前的研究中，我们调查了与倭黑猩猩相比，当涉及其他人类时，人类对一系列情绪情况的感知是否有所不同。一大群儿童和成人参与了情感感知任务，并对倭黑猩猩或人类在描述痛苦或攻击性行为、打哈欠、抓伤、梳理毛发、玩耍、性爱场景或中性场景的场景进行了评分。一组新的人执行了点探测任务来评估对这些材料的注意力偏差。主要发现是，人类感知到的情感场景与倭黑猩猩的情感场景相似，这一结果反映了情感表达的共同进化起源。其他结果表明，孩子们将倭黑猩猩露出的牙齿视为一种积极的信号。该信号与人类的微笑有关，但在痛苦的情况下经常出现，就像当前实验中的情况一样。孩子们在判断模糊表达是积极还是消极时可能仍然需要学习使用上下文线索。此外，性爱场面得到了非常积极的评价，尤其是男性参与者。尽管他们对这些情绪的评价比女性更积极，但他们的注意力也同样受到关注，超过了所有其他情绪类别。最后，人类的哈欠比倭黑猩猩的哈欠更能吸引人类的注意力，这可能与哈欠的高度传染性有关，尤其是当亲密的其他人打哈欠时。目前的研究通过表明人类和倭黑猩猩的情绪表达也有共同的起源，对早期显示人类和倭黑猩猩之间形态、行为和遗传相似性的研究进行了补充。