Human uses of mammals that "one is well advised to study the behaviour rather than attempting to get at any underlying emotion". Charles Darwin however had accepted the idea of emotion in animals, writing his 1872 book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" on the subject. Darwin believed that mammals had social, mental and moral lives. In "The Descent of Man" (1871), he wrote: "There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." Biologists remained wary of the idea, even for the great apes, but this led to serious difficulties, as Donald O. Hebb explained
Emotion in animals could be used to include all the animal kingdom as well as some plants. The second approach, mechanistic, requires an examination of the mechanisms that drive emotions and search for similarities in animals. The mechanistic approach is utilized extensively by Paul, Harding and Mendl. Recognizing the difficulty in studying emotion in non-verbal animals, Paul et al. demonstrate possible ways to better examine this. Observing the mechanisms that function in human emotion expression, Paul et al. suggest that concentration on similar mechanisms in animals can provide clear insights into the animal experience. They noted that in humans, cognitive biases vary according