A framework for the study and assessment of animal emotions

Abstract

A recent review of animal emotion suggests that, as in humans, emotions may tell animals about how dangerous or opportunity-laden their world is, and guide the choices that they make. This has implications for the conceptualisation, study and measurement of animal emotion. In many scientific disciplines, ranging from neuroscience to psychopharmacology to animal welfare science, a better understanding of the emotional states of non-human animals is an important goal. For example, from an animal welfare perspective, if we understand how housing and management impact on the emotional states of animals, we can design or recommend new procedures that help to enhance well-being. Understanding and assessing the emotional states of other species is a challenging task. The conscious experience of emotion is essentially private, and currently we are not able to measure it directly, not even in other people. However, in addition to the conscious feeling of emotion, emotional responses have other components including changes in behaviour, physiology and neural function, and these can be measured. of course possible that other species may show these measurable aspects of emotional responses without experiencing conscious emotions at all. Unfortunately, we cannot know for sure whether and which other species have conscious experiences is a separate one that is beyond the scope of this article. However, if they do, then measurable behavioural, physiological and neural responses might be useful proxy indicators of these emotional experiences. Traditionally, much research on animal emotion has measured these responses to assess how animals react to situations designed to induce specific emotional states. This approach has viewed emotions as discrete entities (e.g. ‘fear’) that arise in response to specific stimuli, and reflect the coordinated activity of ‘emotional systems’ (e.g. the ‘fear system’) rooted in the circuitry of particular brain areas, and serving specific adaptive functions. The control, and behavioural and physiological expression, of certain discrete emotions, notably ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’, has been comprehensively studied in animals by neuroscientists such as Panksepp and LeDoux.