Facilitating Play Through Communication: Significance of Teeth Exposure in the Gorilla Play Face

Primate facial expressions (FEs) likely play an important role in primate society: through facial signals, individuals can potentially send and receive information and may benefit from coordinating their behavior accordingly. Many primates use a relaxed open mouth (ROM) facial display or “play face”...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of primatology 2012-02, Vol.74 (2), p.157-164
Main Authors: WALLER, BRIDGET M., CHERRY, LYNDSAY
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal Communication
animal signals
Animals
bared-teeth display
Communication
Facial Expression
Facial expressions
Female
Gorilla gorilla - physiology
Gorilla gorilla - psychology
Gorillas
laughing
Male
Monkeys & apes
Primate behaviour
primate communication
Sampling
smiling
Social Behavior
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Summary:Primate facial expressions (FEs) likely play an important role in primate society: through facial signals, individuals can potentially send and receive information and may benefit from coordinating their behavior accordingly. Many primates use a relaxed open mouth (ROM) facial display or “play face” (PF) during play behavior, where the mouth is open but teeth are covered. In addition to this conventional PF, however, Western Lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) also use a full PF where the upper teeth are exposed. As the teeth are similarly exposed in the bared‐teeth expression (which is a signal of appeasement, submission and/or affiliation), the full PF may be a blend of the PF and bared‐teeth face, and have a different signal function to the PF alone. Focal animal sampling of captive Western Lowland gorillas (N = 10) showed that the full PF was more often observed in intense rather than gentle play, and intense play bouts that featured the full PF were longer than those that featured only the PF. Both expressions were associated with an increase in affinitive behavior between sender and receiver postplay, but only the full PF was associated with an increase higher than that of play alone. Overall, the findings suggest that the full PF has an additional role in coordinating and maintaining play, possibly though reducing uncertainty in the receiver and confirming that play is only play.
ISSN:0275-2565
1098-2345
DOI:10.1002/ajp.21018