Free Exuberance: The Passion for Life by Kay Redfield Jamison Page A

is, she says, much screaming and trumpeting and communal expression of joy. These intense emotions “are part of what they are doing right. They are the glue that keeps the families together.”
    Joyce Poole, like Cynthia Moss, has studied African elephants for decades. Expressions of joy are frequent in elephant families, she observes, especially when they greet one another after having been apart. The “greeting ceremony” may involve as many as fifty elephants and occurs after elephants have been separated for as short a period as a few hours or as long a time as several weeks. The greeting, Poole writes, is “pandemonium.” The elephants “rush together, heads high, ears raised, folded, and flapping loudly, asthey spin around urinating and defecating, and secreting profusely from their temporal glands. During all this activity they call in unison with a powerful sequence of low-frequency rumbles and higher frequency screams, roars, and trumpets.” Poole believes, as other elephant researchers do, that the joy female elephants feel when they reunite is part of a response essential to their survival. Calves born into large and closely united families are more likely to survive, and strongly shared positive emotional responses reinforce the social bonds within those families. Elephants, Poole observes, are raised in “an incredibly positive and loving environment.” She says she has never seen a calf disciplined: “Protected, comforted, cooed over, reassured, and rescued, yes, but punished, no.” As Cynthia Moss has put it, “elephantine joy plays a very important role in their social lives.”
    Play and other exuberant social behaviors also have a contagious effect. Moods are by nature infectious, and joyous moods tend to spread rapidly throughout a group or herd of animals, heralding as they go that it is safe to enjoy, rest, hunt, explore, or play. Adelie penguins in the Antarctic, for example, exhibit an “ecstatic display” when they return to their colony: “The bird suddenly stretches its head and bill upward,” writes one observer, “and then, with rhythmic beats of its flippers and its head still pointing to the sky, slowly emits a [sound] not unlike the slow roll of a drum.” The behavior, which is repeated over and over again, is highly contagious, spreading from bird to bird throughout the community. As many as a hundred thousand birds have been observed taking part in this display.
    Sometimes contagious exhilaration is preparatory to a group activity that requires both social cohesiveness and physical risk or exertion. This is certainly true for many human activities, as we shall see, but it also occurs in other mammals. Prior to a hunt,African wild dogs will gather together, sniffing one another andbounding about in energetic play. As time goes by, the playing gets wilder and rougher, finally reaching a climax when the whole pack masses together and then sets off after a gazelle or wildebeest. Field biologists who have observed this play-then-hunt behavior contend that the progressive buildup of excitement before hunting looks like “nothing so much as a ‘pep rally,’ that serve[s] to bring the whole pack to hunting pitch.”
    Social play in rats, which occurs after weaning but before sexual maturation, is critical to the development of their social and cognitive skills. Play behavior in these juvenile rodents, not surprisingly, is highly rewarding to them and has been shown to be regulated by thepowerfully reinforcing opioid systems in the brain. Drugs that block these opioid systems reduce the urge to play. Behavior patterns laid down during the early weeks or months of intensive play are of lasting importance not only to the individual animal but to other animals in its social network. Play, which the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has described as the “brain source of joy,” is thought to be tied to a variety of other beneficial physiological responses as well, including strengthening