Topic: animal welfare

Reliable and validated measures of emotion in animals are of great import; they are crucial to better understanding and developing treatments for human mood disorders, and they are necessary for ensuring good animal welfare. We have developed a novel measure of emotion in animals that is grounded in theory and psychological research – decision-making under ambiguity. Specifically, we consider that more ‘optimistic’ decisions about ambiguous stimuli reflect more positive emotional states, while the opposite is true for more ‘pessimistic’ decisions. In this talk, we will outline the background b