Do squirrels get frustrated? A new study suggests they might have an evolutionary motive.
In short: We often see ourselves in squirrels, but do they share our capacity for frustration? Animal behaviorist Mikel Delgado tested this by training fox squirrels to expect walnuts in a box. When the rewards vanished or the box locked, the squirrels’ reactions suggested that frustration might be more than just annoyance.
Mikel Delgado, a doctoral student and animal behaviorist at the University of California, Berkeley, drew inspiration from Charles Darwin’s work on the blurred lines between human and animal emotions. While historical perspectives once dismissed animals as unfeeling machines, Delgado sought to investigate the emotional lives of fox squirrels. She focused on 'flagging,' a behavior where squirrels whip their tails in an s-shaped pattern, typically used as a warning signal when encountering predators like dogs.
To test if squirrels experience frustration, Delgado trained them to open a plastic box to retrieve a walnut. Once the squirrels learned to expect this reward, she introduced obstacles: replacing the walnut with less desirable corn, leaving the box empty, or locking it entirely. Frustration is defined in this context as the failure to receive an expected outcome. The squirrels that faced the locked box exhibited the most intense flagging, alongside aggressive behaviors such as biting, dragging, and toppling the container.
These findings lead Delgado to propose that frustration may serve an evolutionary purpose. Rather than being a simple release of tension, it might function as a mechanism to mobilize energy, allowing an animal to 'brute-force' a solution to a persistent problem. However, the nature of frustration remains a subject of debate among researchers. It is not classified as one of the six universal emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman in the 1960s, which include joy, anger, sadness, surprise, fear, and disgust.
Because frustration is closely linked to anger but lacks a clear, universal definition, experts remain divided on how to categorize it. Some describe it as a specific task-based failure, while others view it as the behavioral response to that failure. Delgado notes that the scientific community is still working to determine exactly what frustration is, highlighting that our understanding of animal cognition continues to evolve as we observe the complex ways creatures react to their environments.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Watch These Frustrated Squirrels Go Nuts! | Deep Look
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