An integrative and functional framework for the study of animal emotion and mood

By M. Mendl, Oliver Burman, Elizabeth S. Paul. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences, 2010

875 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A better understanding of animal emotion is an important goal in disciplines ranging from neuroscience to animal welfare science. The conscious experience of emotion cannot be assessed directly, but neural, behavioural and physiological indicators of emotion can be measured. Researchers have used these measures to characterize how animals respond to situations assumed to induce discrete emotional states (e.g. fear). While advancing our understanding of specific emotions, this discrete emotion approach lacks an overarching framework that can incorporate and integrate the wide range of possible emotional states. Dimensional approaches that conceptualize emotions in terms of universal core affective characteristics (e.g. valence (positivity versus negativity) and arousal) can provide such a framework. Here, we bring together discrete and dimensional approaches to: (i) offer a structure for integrating different discrete emotions that provides a functional perspective on the adaptive value of emotional states, (ii) suggest how long-term mood states arise from short-term discrete emotions, how they also influence these discrete emotions through a bi-directional relationship and how they may function to guide decision-making, and (iii) generate novel hypothesis-driven measures of animal emotion and mood.

Subfields: Genetics, Small Animals, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ba74919217f9deea64125df8f324caa6002d563

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

1. Marian S. Dawkins
2. M. Špinka
3. E. Briefer
4. F. J. Staay
5. R. Nordquist
6. E. Murphy
7. S. Held
8. B. Hine

In Small Animals

1. Marian S. Dawkins
2. E. Briefer
3. F. J. Staay
4. R. Nordquist
5. E. Murphy
6. M. Špinka
7. S. Held
8. B. Hine

In Social Psychology

1. M. Špinka
2. Marian S. Dawkins
3. E. Briefer
4. F. J. Staay
5. R. Nordquist
6. E. Murphy
7. S. Held
8. Matthew P. Walker

Citations in the corpus

• Social dimension of emotions and its implication for animal welfare (2012, background): “(Mendl et al., 2010).”
• Resilience in farm animals: biology, management, breeding and implications for animal welfare (2016, background): “Two important proximate outputs of stimulus modulation by the operational state of the central nervous systems are the affects termed emotions and moods of the animal (Mendl et al. 2010).”
• A Framework for Studying Emotions Across Phylogeny (2014, positive): “Dimensional Models of Emotion (A) A two-dimensional space representingwhat is often called ‘‘core affect,’’ themost popular construct in psychological theories of emotional experience (Barrett and Russell, 1999; Russell, 2003) but also applied more broadly to other animals (Mendl et al., 2010; Rolls”
• A review of behavioural methods to study emotion and mood in pigs, Sus scrofa (2014, background): “Research into animal emotion and mood is not restricted to the field of animal welfare science, and is of increasing interest to disciplines such as affective neuroscience, psychopharmacology and pain research (Mendl et al., 2010).”
• Animal welfare with and without consciousness (2017, background): “These include ‘cognitive bias’ which has the great advantage that it establishes not just short-term preferences but long term effects on an animal’s long-term mood (Harding, Paul & Mendl, 2004; Bateson & Mather, 2007; Mendl et al., 2010).”
• Vocal Expression of Emotions in Mammals: Mechanisms of Production and Evidence (2012, methodology): “The general interest in the field of animal emotion is growing quickly, and is relevant to several disciplines such as evolutionary zoology, affective neuroscience, comparative psychology, animal welfare science and psychopharmacology (Mendl et al., 2010).”
• Vocalisations in farm animals: A step towards positive welfare assessment (2021, background): “Moods, by contrast, are considered to last longer than emotions and not be triggered by specific objects or events - moods are often referred to as free-floating - and rather constitute a running mean of emotions (Mendl et al., 2010).”
• The emergence of emotional lateralization: Evidence in non-human vertebrates and implications for farm animals (2013, positive): “However, recently, researchers have argued that emotional states can be represented as locations in two- or three-dimensional space (core affect; Russell, 2003; Mendl et al., 2010), with valence (positive/negative) and arousal (low/high) as relevant emotional dimensions.”
• What makes a cry a cry? A review of infant distress vocalizations (2012, background): “…would be similar between isolation and capture contexts, we also anticipated that quantitative changes in certain acoustic traits that are associated with the infant’s level of arousal and the urgency of the context would occur in a consistent and graded fashion (Briefer, 2012; Mendl et al., 2010).”
• Animal play and animal welfare (2011, background): “advances in the study of animal emotion and affective neurosciences (e.g. Berridge 2003; Dalgleish 2004; Paul et al. 2005; Rolls 2005; Mendl et al. 2010) have therefore not gone unnoticed by animal welfare science (Boissy et al.”