Do Dogs Enjoy Playing More Than Cats, Rats, or Dolphins? | Psychology Today

Updated January 23, 2026 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

I chose the title for this piece for a number of reasons that will become apparent below. It's no surprise that because I've been thinking about positive emotions and feelings for a long time, often focusing on play behavior, I began thinking about different reasons why joy has evolved—what's it good for—rather than if it has evolved. Some hardline skeptics still aren't sure, but this simply means they're not keeping up with comparative scientific research on joy and having fun, a topic to which an entire issue of the journal Current Biology was devoted. Another important up-to-date source is an excellent essay published a few days ago, titled "Animals experience joy. Scientists want to measure it" by Amber Dance.

Thinking about joy as a unifying principle brings together a lot of data and ideas from different—sometimes surprising and unexpected—areas of study. This is clear for nonhumans and humans, something I learned from an interview I did with Lybi Ma about her recent book, How to Be Less Miserable: End the Negative Mind Loops and Find Joy.

What is joy? Here, I'm using a working definition of joy offered by my long-time colleague, Dr. Colin Allen. Dance writes:

"To keep it simple, Allen and his colleagues have focused on a strict definition of joy as an intense, brief, positive emotion triggered by some event, such as encountering a favorite food or a reunion with a friend. That kind of 'woohoo!' moment seemed easier to assess than, say, ongoing mild contentment. Even with a strict definition, the researchers are contending with variations in joy triggers and responses from one animal to the next, including within the same species or group."

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