Abstract
It is now widely agreed that a positive affective state is a crucial component of animal well-being. The judgment bias test represents a widespread tool used to assess animals’ optimistic/pessimistic attitude and to evaluate their emotional state and welfare. Judgment bias tests have been used several times with dogs (Canis familiaris), in most cases using a spatial test with a bowl placed in ambiguous positions located between a relatively positive trained location (P) which contains a baited bowl and a relatively negative trained location (N) which contains an empty bowl. The latency to approach the bowl in the ambiguous locations is an indicator of the dog’s expectation of a positive/negative outcome. However, results from such tests are often inconclusive. For the present study, the judgment bias test performance of 51 shelter dogs and 40 pet dogs was thoroughly analysed. A pattern emerged with shelter dogs behaving in a more pessimistic-like way than pet dogs. However, this difference between the two populations was detected only when analysing the raw latencies to reach the locations and not the more commonly applied adjusted score (i.e. average latency values). Furthermore, several methodological caveats were found. First of all, a non-negligible percentage of dogs did not pass the training phase, possibly due to the experimental paradigm not being fully suited for this species. Second, results showed a high intra-dog variability in response to the trained locations, i.e. the dogs’ responses were not consistent throughout the test, suggesting that animals may not have fully learned the association between locations and their outcomes. Third, dogs did not always behave differently towards adjacent locations, raising doubts about the animals’ ability to discriminate between locations. Finally, a potential influence of the researcher’s presence on dogs’ performance emerged from analyses. The implications of these findings and potential solutions are discussed.
Highlights
It is widely agreed that a positive affective state, and physical health, is a crucial component of animal well-being [1]
None of the tested variables were significantly related to the minimum number of training trials required to reach the learning criterion, neither in sheltered, nor in pet dogs
To make sure that our results were not biased by testing sheltered dogs, all the analyses were mirrored on a population of pet dogs previously tested with an identical judgment bias tests (JBT) paradigm by the same research group [26]
Summary
It is widely agreed that a positive affective state (comprising both the longer term background mood state and shorter-term discrete emotions [1]), and physical health, is a crucial component of animal well-being [1]. Cognitive bias theories concern the influence of emotional states on cognitive functions (such as attention, memory and judgment) [3, 7]. These phenomena were initially studied in humans, pointing to a pre-attentive bias (selective attention towards threatening stimuli) in anxious people and a post-attentive bias (pessimistic appraisal of ambiguous stimuli) in depressed individuals [9]. The authors found that subjects that presented higher “negative activation” and lower “positive activation” (i.e., a danger-oriented state and a state related to loss or absence of opportunity, respectively (measured using the PANAS scale, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule [14]), tended to interpret the cross as being nearer the negative anchor point. Subjects with higher self-reported measures of anxiety tended to respond to ambiguous tones (i.e., intermediate frequencies between the trained tones) in the same way they responded to the negative tone frequency [15]
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