An human emotion like love often includes having dreams of shared future. Animals don't do that the way we humans do.
Sartre has a nice story about a woman meeting a bear. The womans pulse goes up and she's a bit red in her face.
Did she feel fear or was it love because the bear reminded her of an especially hairy lover?
Sartre then concludes that you can't really know from the outside.
In the Scientists of the Discworld Terry Pratchett makes the point that humans are better described as the storytelling ape them as being described as the rational ape.
There an NLP person named Ross Jeffries who says he can reframe the approach anxiety (fear) that a guy who wants approach a woman feels into being charisma.
In it's nature a lot of emotions use the same physiology. A bit sympathicus activation and parasympathicus deactivation. The difference between them is the story we tell about them.
If emotions are about the stories we tell ourselves than I'm not sure whether animals have them.
What the difference between feeling anticipation of standing in front a crowd and being afraid of standing in front of a crowd in the future?
You might retake that reason 101. Especially the part about causal links
We outcompeted those Neanderthals who had bigger prefontal cortexes.
To use a metaphor from the lesswrong community, if you don't have emotions what distinguishes you from the paper clip maximizer?
These days when I feel strong emotions I say to myself:
Hey, this means I'm alive.
Let's sit down and meditate.
If it's to painful I say to myself, let's explore whether I can change my representational system a bit to make it less painful. With a "broken heart" that worked to remove the pain as long as I kept my concentration. But while I was doing it I was thinking about whether I was simply coping out of the pain.
The interesting thing was that the "broken heart" emotion provided a lot of energy that could be channeled into meditation and being focused while rearranging the representations.