How Studying Interactions Between Animal Emotions, Cognition, and Personality Can Contribute to Improve Farm - Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals - page 91

animal's decisions when appraising new situations or events, especially if there
is a degree of ambiguity in their potentially rewarding or punishing conse-
quences ( Mendl et al.,2009 ). If an animal lives in an environment where it
has experienced fear several times, it would make adaptive sense to appraise
ambiguous events as more likely to be negative and hence to take safety-first
avoidance action. Such persistent biases that could be used as a non-invasive
indicator of comfort or distress merit further investigations. Establishing the
nature and frequency of cognitive processes used to evaluate the environment
may help us to understand why chronic stress sometimes results in apathy or
blunted emotion while in other cases it leads to heightened emotional reactiv-
ity ( Boissy et al.,2001 ). Apathy would likely develop when the animal has no
way of altering negative events, whereas hyper-reactivity would occur when it
thinks it can control such events.
In conclusion, the study of complex interactions between emotions and
cognitive functions offers a new impulse to the study of affective states
in animals. Few integrative and multidisciplinary (behavior, psychology,
physiology, and neurobiology) approaches exist now to objectively assess
affective states of animals in terms of welfare. In addition to studying the
role of cognition in the generation of emotions, studies on the effects of
emotions on cognitive biases should be promoted to provide deeper insight
into the relationships between emotions and more persistent affective states
close to welfare. Taken together, all these studies demonstrate how cognitive
approaches can be used in animals to probe emotions as short-term affective
experiences and welfare as persistent affective experiences.

ANIMAL INDIVIDUALITY IN EMOTIONS: THE CONCEPT
OF PERSONALITY
Not all individuals will react in the same way to challenging situations. They
will be more or less afraid, more or less curious, more or less difficult to handle,
and will react more or less strongly to frightening situations. For instance, there
were marked individual differences in the reactions of beef cattle to frightening
situations ( Kilgour et al.,2006 ). Nobody who has ever worked with animals
will question the fact that there is a considerable variation in how individuals
behave in a given situation, i.e. in the “state” they are in, and that this variation
is, to some extent, stable across time and situations. When we find such stabil-
ity, we can call it a “trait,” such as fearfulness, docility, and aggressiveness.
We can then look for ways of assessing them and for underlying causes for
the variation, such as genetic or developmental effects.
In the last 20 years or so, animal scientists have tried to catch up with what
stockpeople have known since domestication began. And yet, they have not
managed to agree on a label for this variation ( Gosling, 2001 ). In this chapter,
we will use the term “personality,” since it has been shown repeatedly that
consistent

individual differences in behavior of human and non-human