Why do animals seem to smiling or sad? Are these universal expressions present in all animals or we recongnise the remotest facial feaures as some form of emotional expression?
In: Biology
This is just humans being weird. We have this behaviour called anthropomorphism, where we project human traits onto non-human things. It’s responsible for a ton of the weird but harmless things we do like thinking cats love us or thinking we saw Jesus in a slice of toast. It’s picking up on the slightest human-like traits and our brains subconsciously going “this is very human”. It’s a very useful survival tool because it makes us *phenomenal* at recognising actual humans, especially facial expressions, but as a side-effect, it also makes us see faces in strangely-shaped trees and subtly think about our electronic devices as if they were alive. This is probably because human babies [have rubbish eyes](https://youtu.be/GK3ebhSmC4A) but still need to be able to recognise humans, so they evolved to think anything with three shapes in the rough positions of two eyes and a mouth is a human.
Now, to be clear, many animals *do* have systems of emotion of varying complexities, but not many have the social behaviours of facial expressions. The reason we think they look sad is because they look close enough to our basic level necessary to see a human and they also look like something we would think was sad if it was on a human.
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