Emotions play a central role in shaping human behavior, cognition, and social interaction. They bridge biology, behavior, and sociality—functioning as adaptive responses to environmental pressures and as foundations for complex social life.

From an evolutionary standpoint, emotions evolved to enhance survival and reproduction by guiding adaptive behaviors. Basic emotions such as fear, anger, and disgust enabled rapid responses to threats, while pleasure and attachment reinforced caregiving, cooperation, and social bonding.

As human societies grew more complex, emotions became crucial for empathy, trust, guilt, and love—capacities that sustain cooperation and moral behavior. Emotional expression and attunement allowed humans to form alliances and manage social hierarchies.

At both behavioral and neural levels, emotions serve as motivational systems integrating ancient survival mechanisms with higher cognitive processes. They guide attention, decision-making, and communication through universal yet culturally modulated expressions.

Examining emotion through behavioral and evolutionary lenses reveals that emotions are not vestigial or irrational impulses, but rather adaptive strategies that evolved to meet the dual demands of survival and social living. By tracing their trajectory from basic survival functions to the intricacies of sociality, researchers gain deeper insight into the biological foundations, psychological functions, and cultural expressions of human affect. Ultimately, this integrated perspective highlights that emotion is both ancient and sophisticated—a bridge between our evolutionary past and our social present.

From Survival to Sociality: Behavioral and Evolutionary Perspectives on Emotion is dedicated to publishing interdisciplinary research on affective phenomena and their impact on human cognition and behavior. This collection seeks to gather studies that investigate the evolutionary origins and adaptive functions of emotions, comparative approaches across species, and the roles of emotion in communication, social behavior, and survival. Comparative and cross-disciplinary contributions that illuminate evolutionary continuities and divergences in emotional systems are especially encouraged. By integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, ethology, behavioral ecology, affective neuroscience, and comparative cognition, the collection aims to elucidate how emotional processes emerge, evolve, and operate across species—including humans. Ultimately, it seeks to advance our understanding of emotion as a biologically grounded adaptive system that shapes cognition, behavior, and social complexity throughout the tree of life.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

• animal research on emotion processing

• evolutionary approaches to human emotion

• the role of emotions in social behavior, empathy, cooperation, and aggression

• cooperative behavior and evolution of social structures

• neural and physiological correlates of emotions from an evolutionary perspective

• human–animal interactions and cross-species emotion recognition

• ecological and applied perspectives on emotional behavior

• theoretical contributions to the field of emotion science

• training/interventions to optimize emotion-cognition interactions and improve well-being

This Research Topic welcomes Original Research, Reviews, Mini Reviews, Methods, Theory and Hypothesis, Opinions, Perspectives

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From Survival to Sociality: Evolutionary and Behavioral Perspectives on Emotions