Do insects feel pain and emotion?

I’ve always been told, while on my never ending mission to eliminate spiders from my world, that they are “more afraid of me than I am of them”.
Really? Then why do the insist on tormenting me?

Seriously though, they must feel hunger since they eat. I have no idea whether or not they feel pain.
I can’t imagine that they feel any kind of emotion.
I always figured that they just existed to freak me out. lol

Interesting question. I can’t wait to read what the other Jellies come up with.

Pain probably yes. Emotion undoubtedly not.

Ok, so many bugs have no problem eating each other and even their own. So I really doubt they have emotions. Spiders eat their babies and mates.

Maybe not in the way humans do since their nervous system is totally different. I am not sure if they even have pain receptors. They obviously feel fear, hunger and the need to reproduce.

On a lighter note. I like to think of myself as an animal lover and I respect all animals although I avoid close contact with reptiles and other creepy crawlies. However, no matter how hard I try, I cannot bear cockroaches and that spray comes out the minute I see one! I DO feel bad seeing the creature die slowly as it takes hours in some cases. Am I being a hypocrite saying I respect living creatures????

I hope wasps do, as their insides become their outsides when I splat the buggers with a rolled up newspaper…hiding behind the wife.

No. Insects don’t feel pain. Pain is a subjective and emotional experience. Pain-an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.
– International Association for the Study of Pain

Their nervous system is too primitive for emotions, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect#Nervous_system

“At least a few insects have nociceptors, cells that detect and transmit sensations of pain. This was discovered in 2003 by studying the variation in reactions of larvae of the common fruitfly Drosophila to the touch of a heated probe and an unheated one.”

I sure hope so.

They have stung me for years – a band of bees conspired and bit me badly.

Fire ants love to bite my legs.

So if I can give back to them (and they can feel) just a fraction of the pain that they have caused me over the years, then justice will be served.

I see no reason why any life form could not feel pain. I have never understood where this idea comes from that certain animals don’t. I mean, I guess humans want to believe that creatures that don’t look like us can’t act like us… it makes us feel special, better, somehow higher than them. But when we start assuming things because we want them to be true, or in order to excuse our actions, then we have to start questioning those assumptions.

If you’ve ever watched ants or other insects, or played with them as a child, you’ll know that they will recoil from certain things. Does it mean anything to distinguish between the words “discomfort” or “pain” or “dislike” or “fear” or “distaste” in such examples? Because if deciding that the ant is experiencing pain or fear is just a matter of the degree of discomfort, I think that argument is already lost.

Who can deny that our mammalian pets have emotions? It is absurd to think that they don’t. Perhaps insects and fish experience discomfort in ways that are different than ours – does it matter whether we call this emotion? If so, why?

For the record, I am a meat-eater, although I would prefer that butchering be done in ways that prevent suffering. I will step on an ant or swat a fly in my house, but I prefer to shoo spiders out the door. I don’t feel guilt about any of it, and I don’t need to pretend that they don’t feel pain in order to justify that.

Insects, like us, use a punishment/reward mechanism based on neurotransmitters to learn what’s beneficial and what to avoid (see this research from the Max Planck Institute).

Emotion is a very complex phenomenon. It begins with a positive or negative stimulus, like the release of the reward neurotransmitter dopamine. That probably feels great to an insect in much the same way it feels great to us.

But there’s also a large cerebral component to emotion. We construct a mental narrative around the feeling that elaborates on it and interprets it in the larger context of our identity. So pleasant or unpleasant incidents aren’t merely transient occurrences, but can actually play on your sense of who you are (e.g. whether you see yourself as a “winner” or a “loser”, “popular” or “pariah”). This amplifies that original stimulus greatly, because it’s now tied into our self concept. Clearly, insects don’t experience this dimension of emotion.

I can’t believe that some people still think that other life forms do not feel pain. Anything that has a nervous system feels discomfort. Insects may not feel emotion, then again, how the hell could we know this for sure?
All other mammals absolutely feel emotion, undoubtedly.

My 15 yr. old goose that I had to rehome after raising him from a 10 day old gosling is so imprinted on me and shrieks and runs after me in a very emotional state when I appear to be moving too far away from him.
He sees me as his mother goose and when I get too far out of sight or away from him he panics. Clearly and emotional reaction.

Once, to my regret, I sprayed a huge black widow spider that had an egg case in my garage. Instinct probably, but…I felt SO bad, the poor female after being soaked in bug killer ran up the wall and wrapped her dying body around her egg sac. It broke my heart. I no longer wantonly kill anything, and do my best to relocate anything if possible.
The last creature that I had to kill was a monster rattlesnake that bit my cat under my deck last summer. ( he survived a $1000 later.)
Had it not been for the cat, and danger to myself and other pets I would have just hosed it down and driven it out, back into the weeds.

Turns out I was wrong. Looks like bugs do not feel pain. From Bug Girl’s Blog
http://membracid.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/philosophical-entomology/

If Bug Girl says it, I believe it.

Thanks all for the answers! I am not quite on Coloma’s level but I was starting at a ruined butterfly the other day wondering whether it was more humane to leave it alive or kill it. I left it next to some flowers..Seems I went with the bug girl approach. Though I am hesitant to embrace her philosophy and reasoning fully.

This is no where near settled for me but I did learn from the links provided. As well as the collected thoughts of others.

^^^ Today I was high up in the Seirras and was mesmerized at a huge flood of tiny purple and orange butterflies sucking water and minerals out of the sand near a fork of the river. Gawd….life is so beautiful!
ALL life!
Sadly, most people are so unaware they never even see the little miracles around us at any moment. :-)

That sounds devastatingly beautiful. Nature is so showy. ... Though I am not convinced about maggots or cockroaches… I just want to hurl .. : )

Die maggots die! Yep, maggots are about the ONLY thing that grosses me out. Then again, they do consume the most disgusting of waste, poo, corpses, rotten garbage….gotta give ‘em that anyway. The insect Vultures.