Emotional Insect Debate

For anyone with even a passing understanding of an insect's biology, it would seem quite obvious that they are incapable of feeling emotions. Even the brains that we understand do not exist in insects. They have ganglion, which are essentially little cell clusters all over their bodies that regulate particular groups of appendages. How could they experience emotions if they didn't have emotional centers in their brains? The University of London carried out one of the more insightful examinations of this idea. They published the results of their colorful flower tests in 2016.

Yellow flowers contained a liquid that was far less rich in sugar than blue-green blooms, which had a sweet liquid. As a result, bees started to quickly fly to the blue-green blossoms. The bees were less conditioned to fly to those flowers for their sugar reward even when similarly concentrated liquids were placed in blooms of different colors.

Nevertheless, the propensity vanished when dopamine-blocking drugs were administered, showing that the expectation of a reward made the bees less driven and hopeful that they would enjoy a blue-green nectar. This clearly demonstrated that in the absence of an emotional reward, even survival instincts were insufficient as a motivator.