Integrating bottom-up internalist views of emotional feelings with top-down externalist views: Might brain affective changes constitute reward and punishment effects within animal brains?

Assessing and Enhancing the Welfare of Animals with Equivocal and Reliable Cues

Simple Summary

Actions of human caretakers influence the experience of animals under their care, in zoos and elsewhere. These animals often learn to associate stimuli—sights, smells, sounds—with desirable outcomes such as feedings, training sessions, or other positive experiences. Here, we propose that a conscientious approach to providing reliable cues about daily events and observing animal behavior in response to both reliable and uncertain cues can help caretakers support and assess animal welfare.

Abstract

The actions of human caretakers strongly influence animals living under human care. Here, we consider how intentional and unintentional signals provided by caretakers can inform our assessment of animals’ well-being as well as help to support it. Our aim is to assist in further developing techniques to learn animals’ affective state from their behavior and to provide simple suggestions for how animal caretakers’ behavior can support animal welfare. We suggest that anticipatory behavior towards expected rewards is related to decision-making behavior as viewed through the cognitive bias lens. By considering the predictions of the theories associated with anticipatory behavior and cognitive bias, we propose to use specific cues to probe the cumulative affective state of animals. Additionally, our commentary draws on the logic of reward sensitivity and judgement bias theories to develop a framework that suggests how reliable and equivocal signals may influence animals’ affective states. Application of this framework may be useful in supporting the welfare of animals in human care.

The role of conviction and narrative in decision-making under radical uncertainty

We propose conviction narrative theory (CNT) to broaden decision-making theory in order to better understand and analyse how subjectively means-end rational actors cope in contexts in which the traditional assumptions in decision-making models fail to hold. Conviction narratives enable actors to draw on their beliefs, causal models, and rules of thumb to identify opportunities worth acting on, to simulate the future outcome of their actions, and to feel sufficiently convinced to act. The framework focuses on how narrative and emotion combine to allow actors to deliberate and to select actions that they think will produce the outcomes they desire. It specifies connections between particular emotions and deliberative thought, hypothesising that approach and avoidance emotions evoked during narrative simulation play a crucial role. Two mental states, Divided and Integrated, in which narratives can be formed or updated, are introduced and used to explain some familiar problems that traditional models cannot.

The cross-mammalian neurophenomenology of primal emotional affects: From animal feelings to human therapeutics

The neural correlates of human emotions are easy to harvest. In contrast, the neural constitution of emotional feelings in humans has resisted systematic scientific analysis. This review summarizes how preclinical affective neuroscience initiatives are making progress in decoding the neural nature of such feelings in animal brains. This has been achieved by studying the rewarding and punishing effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) of subcortical emotional networks (labeled SEEING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY systems) that evoke distinct emotion action patterns, as well as rewarding and punishing effects in animals. The implications of this knowledge for development of new psychiatric interventions, especially depression, are discussed. Three new antidepressive therapeutics arising from this work are briefly noted: 1) DBS of the medial forebrain bundle (MFB) in humans, 2) reduction of psychological pain that may arise from excessive PANIC arousal, and 3) facilitation of social joy through the study of social play in rats The overall argument is that we may more readily develop new psychiatric interventions through preclinical models if we take animal emotional feelings seriously, as opposed to just behavioral changes, as targets for development of new treatments.