How Studying Interactions Between Animal Emotions, Cognition, and Personality Can Contribute to Improve Farm - Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals - page 82

well-planned, long-term strategy to ensure the well-being of future generations but
through the simpler, but no less intense, need to feel good about themselves.
Webster (2005) .
This notion was included in the European Union Treaty of Amsterdam
( European Union, 1997 ) highlighting the fact that because animals are sen-
tient, their welfare matters ( Duncan, 1993; Veissier and Boissy, 2007 ). This
requires recognition that animals have emotional capacities, and that they
attempt to minimize exposure to situations eliciting negative emotions like
fear, frustration, distress and anxiety, and seek situations eliciting positive
ones like pleasure and joy ( Dawkins, 1990; Duncan, 1996; Spruijt et al.,
2001 ). Improving our understanding of the range and depth of emotions
that animals can experience is essential in order to safeguard and to
improve their welfare. One of the key factors explaining the evolutionary
success of emotions is that they would favor adaptive cognition and action.
Emotions refer to processes which are likely to have evolved from basic
mechanisms that gave the animals the ability to avoid harm/punishment
or to seek valuable resources/rewards ( Panksepp, 1994 ; Paul et al., 2005 ).
Animals should thus be capable of assigning affective values to their
environment.
Although there is no single general definition, an emotion can be defined
as an intense but short-lived affective response to an event associated with
specific body changes ( Dantzer, 1988 ). An emotion is classically described
by a subjective component, which is, strictly speaking, the emotional experi-
ence, and two expressive components, one motor (e.g., facial expressions,
movements) and the other physiological (e.g., cardiac and cortisol reactions)
( Dantzer, 1988 ). Emotions differ from sensations which are simply physical
consequences of exposure to particular stimuli (e.g., heat, pressure), and
from feelings which only designate internal states with no specific reference
to external reactions. The emotional experience of animals is inferred from
the behavioral and/or physiological components. There has been a growing
interest in the study of emotions in animals over the last few decades, result-
ing in the emergence of a discipline referred to as Affective Neuroscience
( Panksepp, 1998 ). Scientists have made huge progress in understanding
how animals perceive their environment and the feelings prompted by this
perception. First, in the 1970s, it became clear that the stress response, which
was initially considered as a physiological concept ( Selye, 1936 ), is triggered
by psychological factors: it is the animal's representation of an event rather
than the event itself that determines its stress reactions. This was inferred
from studies on fasting monkeys who were either separated from or in the
presence of normally fed counterparts ( Mason, 1971 ). When separated from
their normally fed counterparts, fastened animals were not aware of the
threat imposed on their body and were not stressed, while they showed signs
of stress in the presence of normally fed animals. Mason concluded that the