It's certainly intently focused, interested, in the sea lion. It doesn't appear frightened, so I don't think it's too much to say that the elephant would prefer to have this novel experience rather than not have it. That's at the very least, scientists get weird about animal emotions because it's difficult to judge their motivations by observing their body language and actions. That doesn't mean they don't have complex emotions. I think this elephants ears, eyes and the fact it's trying to touch the sea lion are a good indication, among other things, that it's trying absorb as much sensory information as possible. I am interested in the fact that its mouth is open, I don't believe elephants express emotion via facial expressions, but, it may be that the experience of seeing the sea lion was so surprising that it caused it to relax its jaw, a jaw dropping experience.

There are people who think that animals are automatons whose every action is driven only by survival instincts, those people are stupid and/or probably have a vested interest in not feeling empathy for them. For one thing, nearly, or possibly literally, everything humans do could/is driven by the same forces. The only difference, as far as we know, is that we have language, which allows us to express our feeling about reflecting upon our thoughts. Some animals may do the same thing, they just can't tell us.

TLDR: A problem with scientific rigor is that there are some things that we don't know how to test, some scientists interpret that to mean that if they don't know how to test something, then it doesn't exist. Those people are called bad scientists.