How Studying Interactions Between Animal Emotions, Cognition, and Personality Can Contribute to Improve Farm - Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals - page 87

The expressions of fear, like those of all the emotions, are brief reactions
that are often difficult to measure, particularly in farm animals kept in com-
mercial conditions. According to Forkman et al. (2007) , research in this area
would benefit substantially if more effort was devoted to overcoming three
particular weaknesses. First, many tests used to measure fear need more
rigorous examination of validity and repeatability. Validation through evalu-
ation of inter-test consistency should thus be given more attention in future
studies ( Forkman et al., 2007 ). Second, there is a pressing need for standard-
ized protocols to ensure harmonization of methods across research teams and
countries. This would reduce unnecessary duplication of effort while greatly
facilitating meaningful interpretation of the results and their general acceptance.
Third, the protocols have to be robust and practical: it must be possible to carry
them out in an acceptable time frame, at the farm level, and without causing too
much disturbance to the farmers' work. Therefore, it is not enough simply to
transfer a laboratory test to the field without making appropriate modifications
to fit the animals' biology and needs, the environmental conditions and the
farmers' requirements.
A recent comprehensive review of the methodologies used to assess fear
( Forkman et al., 2007 ) in farm animals was a very useful first step in bring-
ing together some of the above-mentioned issues; it describes the various
methods used for cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, goats, chickens, and quail, and
gives indications of their repeatability and validity. Similarly, fear tests
involving exposure to humans were discussed in a review of human animal
interactions ( Waiblinger et al., 2006 ). The Welfare Quality s project (2009),
a multi-disciplinary EU-funded study, also made substantial progress in
developing, refining, validating, and standardizing numerous animal-based
measures of welfare, including fear-related behaviors. However, there is still
a need for continued development and refinement of fear-related measures.
CONTRIBUTION OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY TO
ACCESS ANIMAL EMOTIONS
Emotion is any mental experience with high intensity and high hedonic
content (i.e. the negative or positive valence). In humans, the emotional
experience is generally inferred from verbal self-reports. Since conceptual-
psychological scales cannot be used in animals that have no verbal language,
their emotional experience can thus only be inferred from their behavioral
and physiological reactions. Emotions have both arousal and valence dimen-
sions. However, behavioral and physiological reactions generally provide,
as it has been reported in the previous section, a quantitative assessment of
the emotional activation (i.e. the arousal of the emotional response), but they
do not allow defining the exact nature of the emotion (i.e. the negative or
positive valence) felt by the animal. For example, plasmatic concentrations
of glucocorticoid can be increased both in response to acute negative