Mood induction alters attention toward negative-positive stimulus pairs in sheep

Raoult, Camille M. C.; Gygax, Lorenz (2019). Mood induction alters attention toward negative-positive stimulus pairs in sheep. Scientific Reports, 9(1), p. 7759. Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/s41598-019-44330-z

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Mood is a lasting affective state that influences motivation and decision-making by pre-shaping a subject’s expectations (pessimism/optimism). Mood states affect biases in judgment, memory, and attention. Due to a lack of verbal report, assessing mood in non-human animals is challenging and is often compromised by intense training sessions. Measuring mood using attentional biases can circumvent this problem, as it takes advantage of observing a spontaneous reaction. As in humans, we expected that negative mood will heighten attention toward negative compared to positive stimuli. Here, we validate measures of attention toward acoustic stimuli in sheep (N = 64) and assess sheep’s differential attention toward acoustic stimuli before and after mood induction (N = 32). Mood was induced by manipulating the environment. We used animal vocalizations (dog barking and sheep bleating as negative and positive stimuli, respectively) varying in intensity and played simultaneously from one side each, and measured lateral attention based on the sheep’s behavior. Overall results were somewhat ambiguous. Yet, negative mood sheep seemed to shift their attention more toward dog vocalizations when the stimulus pair was well balanced at baseline. Though some adaptations are still needed, our approach could be a promising alternative to measure animals’ mood without prior
training.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

05 Veterinary Medicine > Department of Clinical Research and Veterinary Public Health (DCR-VPH) > Veterinary Public Health Institute > Animal Welfare Division
05 Veterinary Medicine > Department of Clinical Veterinary Medicine (DKV) > ISME Equine Clinic Bern > ISME Equine Clinic, Internal medicine
05 Veterinary Medicine > Department of Clinical Veterinary Medicine (DKV)
05 Veterinary Medicine > Department of Clinical Research and Veterinary Public Health (DCR-VPH)

UniBE Contributor:

Raoult, Camille Madeleine Carmen

Subjects:

600 Technology > 630 Agriculture

ISSN:

2045-2322

Publisher:

Nature Publishing Group

Language:

English

Submitter:

Barbara Bach

Date Deposited:

22 Jul 2019 12:54

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:29

Publisher DOI:

10.1038/s41598-019-44330-z

PubMed ID:

31123314

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.131627

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/131627

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