In this chapter, we apply the affective social learning (ASL) concept to the social learning of natural skill sets in immature orang-utans since it can serve as an illustration of the majority of learning that occurs in wild apes. Most orang-utan social learning happens during everyday tasks and without any active involvement of the role model. Consequently, detecting the emotional state(s) of the role model is nearly impossible. We focus therefore on the emotional responses of the immature learners to the role models’ behaviours. Our data on peering (attentive, sustained close-range watching of conspecifics), which is often followed by selective practice of the observed behaviour by the peerer, suggests that there is some highly specific emotional arousal of the immatures during social learning. The role models’ actions with the object seem to play a central role in the learning process. However, immatures appear to decide on their own whether to attend to the information or not, as in affective observation, the second stage of ASL. Developmental changes in role-model preferences support the notion that trust in the role model is critical for ASL to work. Given that we can use the learners’ responses as proof of the affective states of the role models, ASL may be an important part of the mechanism that guides and optimizes the acquisition of learned skills in wild great apes. However, the lower we set the bar for the affective states (or emotions) of the role models for ASL to work, the more difficult it is to verify their presence and the more ASL will overlap with ordinary social learning.

Emotions have often been considered negatively in the animal literature, offering so-called parsimonious explanations to uncontrolled animal behaviour. This has particularly been the case for primate vocalizations, as opposed to flexible human language and potential goal-directed primate gestures. We believe that affective social learning (ASL) can offer a useful way to analyse emotions through a different perspective, integrating emotions and learning to analyse primates’ and other animals’ behaviour. In this chapter, we review the primate literature for potential cases of ASL, re-analysing classic cases such as the vervet alarm call system as well as more recent discoveries related to emotional behaviour. To decipher whether ASL is cognitively possible for non-human primates, we dissect the cognitive requirements for each step of ASL: emotional contagion, affective observation, social referencing and natural pedagogy. Our review suggests that, despite the lack of evidence for the latter step, there is evidence for all other types of ASL in primates, particularly in the domains of the ontogeny of communicative and cultural learning. We conclude by highlighting that ASL may constitute a useful comparative framework to describe various types of teaching that do not necessitate the demanding requirement of full-blown human intentional teaching.