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Articles 391 - 420 of 438
Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Could Fish Feel Pain? A Wider Perspective, Yew-Kwang Ng
Could Fish Feel Pain? A Wider Perspective, Yew-Kwang Ng
Animal Sentience
Key’s (2016) target article provides some strong arguments but also makes some logical mistakes. The arguments are not sufficient to support a definite conclusion that fish cannot feel pain. A multi-faceted perspective taking into account brain structure, chemical secretion in brain, animal behavior, and evolutionary biology may be useful and appears, at least in some aspects, to suggest the opposite conclusion from that of the target article.
Why Babies Do Not Feel Pain, Or: How Structure-Derived Functional Interpretations Can Go Wrong, Helmut Segner
Why Babies Do Not Feel Pain, Or: How Structure-Derived Functional Interpretations Can Go Wrong, Helmut Segner
Animal Sentience
The response to pain involves a non-conscious, reflexive action and a conscious perception. According to Key (2016), consciousness — and thus pain perception — depends on a neuronal correlate that has a “unique neural architecture” as realized in the human cortex. On the basis of the “bioengineering principle that structure determines function,” Key (2016) concludes that animal species such as fish, which lack the requisite cortex-like neuroanatomical structure, are unable to feel pain. This commentary argues that the relationship between brain structure and brain function is less straightforward than suggested in Key’s target article.
Should Fish Feel Pain? A Plant Perspective, František Baluška
Should Fish Feel Pain? A Plant Perspective, František Baluška
Animal Sentience
Key (2016) claims fish that fish do not feel pain because they lack the necessary neuronal architecture: their responses to noxious stimuli, according to Key, are executed automatically without any feelings. However, as pointed out by many of his commentators, this conclusion is not convincing. Plants might provide some clues. Plants are not usually thought to be very active behaviorally, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Moreover, in stressful situations, plants produce numerous chemicals that have painkilling and anesthetic properties. Finally, plants, when treated with anesthetics, cannot execute active behaviors such as touch-induced leaf movements or rapid trap closures after localizing …
Why Is Fish “Feeling” Pain Controversial?, E. Don Stevens
Why Is Fish “Feeling” Pain Controversial?, E. Don Stevens
Animal Sentience
In his excellent target article, Key (2016) develops a mechanistic argument in an attempt to show why it is unlikely that fish can “feel” pain or for that matter, “feel” anything. The topic is controversial and likely to achieve the goal of getting many hits for the inaugural issue of the new journal, Animal Sentience. In my view, the question is unlikely to be answered, for two reasons. First, because the proponents of the “fish feel pain” controversy are untrained and unskilled in the details and jargon of neurophysiology and/or neuroanatomy, and the opponents of the controversy, like Key, …
Nonverbal Indicators Of Pain, Simon Van Rysewyk
Nonverbal Indicators Of Pain, Simon Van Rysewyk
Animal Sentience
In discussing fish pain, Key (2016) privileges pain in humans — “the only species able to directly report on its feelings.” Human experience of pain is not necessarily best reflected by verbal self-report, however. Neural responses to noxious stimuli are influenced by individual differences and by context. Nonverbal pain displays such as facial expressions reflect part of the neural response to noxious stimuli. Most mammals have a specific facial grimace reflecting pain. If fish have a somatic expression of pain, the development of a reliable and accurate somatic pain scale specific to fish could make a contribution to the debate …
Fish Pain: A Painful Topic, Carl Safina
Fish Pain: A Painful Topic, Carl Safina
Animal Sentience
If fish cannot feel pain, why do stingrays have purely defensive tail spines that deliver venom? Stingrays’ ancestral predators are fish. And why do many fishes possess defensive fin spines, some also with venom that produces pain in humans? These things did not evolve just in case sentient humans would evolve millions of years later and then invent scuba. If fish react purely unconsciously to “noxious” stimuli, why aren’t sharp jabbing spines enough? Why also stinging venom?
Death In The Family, Maria Botero
Death In The Family, Maria Botero
Animal Sentience
Barbara King presents grief as the result of the capacity of human and non-human animals for social and affectionate bonds. This is a novel approach that provides a context for interpreting behavioral evidence of grief. The book also offers thought-provoking insights into the relationship between emotion and the expression of emotion. The most surprising element of King’s approach is that, throughout the book, her account of non-human animal grief forces us to reassess the way we treat them.
Animal Sentience: The Other-Minds Problem, Stevan Harnad
Animal Sentience: The Other-Minds Problem, Stevan Harnad
Animal Sentience
The only feelings we can feel are our own. When it comes to the feelings of others, we can only infer them, based on their behavior — unless they tell us. This is the “other-minds problem.” Within our own species, thanks to language, this problem arises only for states in which people cannot speak (infancy, aphasia, sleep, anaesthesia, coma). Our species also has a uniquely powerful empathic or “mind-reading” capacity: We can (sometimes) perceive from the behavior of others when they are in states like our own. Our inferences have also been systematized and operationalized in biobehavioral science …
Fish Lack The Brains And The Psychology For Pain, Stuart W.G. Derbyshire
Fish Lack The Brains And The Psychology For Pain, Stuart W.G. Derbyshire
Animal Sentience
Debate about the possibility of fish pain focuses largely on the fish’s lack of the cortex considered necessary for generating pain. That view is appealing because it avoids relatively abstract debate about the nature of pain experience and subjectivity. Unfortunately, however, that debate cannot be entirely avoided. Subcortical circuits in the fish might support an immediate, raw, “pain” experience. The necessity of the cortex only becomes obvious when considering pain as an explicitly felt subjective experience. Attributing pain to fish only seems absurd when pain is considered as a state of explicit knowing.
Cortex Necessary For Pain — But Not In Sense That Matters, Adam J. Shriver
Cortex Necessary For Pain — But Not In Sense That Matters, Adam J. Shriver
Animal Sentience
Certain cortical regions are necessary for pain in humans in the sense that, at particular times, they play a direct role in pain. However, it is not true that they are necessary in the more important sense that pain is never possible in humans without them. There are additional details from human lesion studies concerning functional plasticity that undermine Key’s (2016) interpretation. Moreover, no one has yet identified any specific behaviors that mammalian cortical pain regions make possible that are absent in fish.
Anthropomorphic Denial Of Fish Pain, Lynne U. Sneddon, Matthew C. Leach
Anthropomorphic Denial Of Fish Pain, Lynne U. Sneddon, Matthew C. Leach
Animal Sentience
Key (2016) affirms that we do not know how the fish brain processes pain but denies — because fish lack a human-like cortex — that fish can feel pain. He affirms that birds, like fish, have a singly-laminated cortex and that the structure of the bird brain is quite different from that of the human brain, yet he does not deny that birds can feel pain. In this commentary we describe how Key cites studies that substantiate mammalian pain but discounts the same kind of data as evidence of fish pain. We suggest that Key's interpretations are illogical, do not …
Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown
Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown
Animal Sentience
Whether fish feel pain is a hot political topic. The consequences of our denial are huge given the billions of fish that are slaughtered annually for human consumption. The economic costs of changing our commercial fishery harvest practices are also likely to be great. Key outlines a structure-function analogy of pain in humans, tries to force that template on the rest of the vertebrate kingdom, and fails. His target article has so far elicited 34 commentaries from scientific experts from a broad range of disciplines; only three of these support his position. The broad consensus from the scientific community is …
Fish Pain: Would It Change Current Best Practice In The Real World?, B. K. Diggles
Fish Pain: Would It Change Current Best Practice In The Real World?, B. K. Diggles
Animal Sentience
Much of the “fish pain debate” relates to how high the bar for pain should be set. The close phylogenetic affinities of teleosts with cartilaginous fishes which appear to lack nociceptors suggests caution should be applied by those who seek to lower the bar, especially given the equivocal and conflicting nature of the experimental data currently available for teleosts. Nevertheless, even if we assume fish “feel pain,” it is difficult to see how current best practice in aquaculture would change. This is because of the need to avoid stress at all stages of the rearing process to optimize health, growth …
Leaving The Door Open For Fish Pain: Evolutionary Convergence And The Utility Of ‘Just-So Stories’, David B. Edelman
Leaving The Door Open For Fish Pain: Evolutionary Convergence And The Utility Of ‘Just-So Stories’, David B. Edelman
Animal Sentience
Key argues that fish do not experience pain because they lack the necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) brain structures and associated functional circuitry to engender such conscious percepts. I propose that fish pain may be dependent on neuroanatomical regions and pathways that are structurally and/or functionally analogous — but not strictly homologous — to well-characterized mammalian substrates of pain. An example is the convergent appearance of the complex, single-compartment eye across invertebrate and vertebrate phylogeny. Structural-functional convergence is ubiquitous in evolution. Comparative inferences and correlative lines of evidence play an important role in building evolutionary arguments. The dismissal of the …
Pain-Capable Neural Substrates May Be Widely Available In The Animal Kingdom, Edgar T. Walters
Pain-Capable Neural Substrates May Be Widely Available In The Animal Kingdom, Edgar T. Walters
Animal Sentience
Neural and behavioral evidence from diverse species indicates that some forms of pain may be generated by coordinated activity in networks far smaller than the cortical pain matrix in mammals. Studies on responses to injury in squid suggest that simplification of the circuitry necessary for conscious pain might be achieved by restricting awareness to very limited information about a noxious event, possibly only to the fact that injury has occurred, ignoring information that is much less important for survival, such as the location of the injury. Some of the neural properties proposed to be critical for conscious pain in mammals …
Spinning Our Wheels And Deepening The Divide: Call For An Evidence-Based Approach To The Fish Pain Debate, Steven J. Cooke
Spinning Our Wheels And Deepening The Divide: Call For An Evidence-Based Approach To The Fish Pain Debate, Steven J. Cooke
Animal Sentience
There is vigorous ongoing debate about whether fish feel pain and have the capacity to suffer. The body of literature dedicated to the topic is increasing but what is particularly problematic is that the majority of the contributions represent opinion pieces and thus fall within the realm of advocacy. Many of the empirical research papers purporting that fish do or do not feel pain have problems with cavalier use of definitions, poor experimental design, or statistical/technical issues and tend to include advocacy statements in their interpretations. Rather than continuing to spin our wheels and deepen the divide, I would advocate …
Animal Suffering Calls For More Than A Bigger Cage, Simon R. B. Leadbeater
Animal Suffering Calls For More Than A Bigger Cage, Simon R. B. Leadbeater
Animal Sentience
Ng (2016) argues for incremental welfare biology partly because it would be impossible to demonstrate conclusively that animals are sentient. He argues that low cost changes in industrial practices and working collaboratively may be more effective in advancing animal welfare than more adversarial approaches. There is merit in some of Ng’s recommendations but a number of his arguments are, in my view, misdirected. The fact that nonhuman animals feel has already been adequately demonstrated. Cruelty to animals is intrinsic to some industries, so the only way to oppose it is to oppose the industry.
Mediating Claims Through Critical Anthropomorphism, Gordon Burghardt
Mediating Claims Through Critical Anthropomorphism, Gordon Burghardt
Animal Sentience
Key’s (2016) discussion of his claim that fish do not feel pain ignores the history of attempts to study the attribution of mental states to other species. Although willing to accept that mammals feel pain, Key claims that fish lack the mammalian neural mechanisms underlying pain and are unconscious of their experiences. Consequently, we do not need to be overly concerned about fishing practices that would otherwise be viewed as painful. Key uses a flawed anthropomorphic lens. All attributions of mental events to organisms other than oneself involve inferences derived from anthropomorphic processes through which we process physiological and behavioral …
Brain Processes For “Good” And “Bad” Feelings: How Far Back In Evolution?, Jaak Panksepp
Brain Processes For “Good” And “Bad” Feelings: How Far Back In Evolution?, Jaak Panksepp
Animal Sentience
The question of whether fish can experience pain or any other feelings can only be resolved by neurobiologically targeted experiments. This commentary summarizes why this is essential for resolving scientific debates about consciousness in other animals, and offers specific experiments that need to be done: (i) those that evaluate the rewarding and punishing effects of specific brain regions and systems (for instance, with deep-brain stimulation); (ii) those that evaluate the capacity of animals to regulate their affective states; and (iii) those that have direct implications for human affective feelings, with specific predictions — for instance, the development of new treatments …
Pain And Other Feelings In Humans And Animals, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio
Pain And Other Feelings In Humans And Animals, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio
Animal Sentience
Evidence from neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropsychology suggests that the experience of feelings in humans does not depend exclusively on structures of the cerebral cortex. It does not seem warranted to deny the possibility of feeling in animals on the grounds that their cerebral cortices are not comparable to those of humans.
How Not To Move The Line Drawn On Pain, Bjorn H. Merker
How Not To Move The Line Drawn On Pain, Bjorn H. Merker
Animal Sentience
In this second commentary I outline the inadequacy of Key's responses to the many peer critiques of his thesis that have so far appeared in Animal Sentience. I illustrate with examples drawn from his response to my first commentary.
Modulation Of Behavior In Communicating Emotion, Martin Gardiner
Modulation Of Behavior In Communicating Emotion, Martin Gardiner
Animal Sentience
King discusses many examples where two animals, as they bond, behave in ways we interpret as expressing love for one another. If one of the bonded animals then dies, signs of loving are replaced by signs we interpret as expressing grief by the animal who remains. I propose a pathway for emotional communication between an animal and an observer that can have a central role in these and other observations by King and in our overall ability to interpret observed behavior in relation to emotion. This pathway provides evidence of emotion in an observed animal by communicating evidence of emotion’s …
Why Human Pain Can’T Tell Us Whether Fish Feel Pain, Victoria A. Braithwaite, Paula Droege
Why Human Pain Can’T Tell Us Whether Fish Feel Pain, Victoria A. Braithwaite, Paula Droege
Animal Sentience
In his target article, Key (2016) reviews the neuroanatomy of human pain and uses what is known about human pain to argue that fish cannot experience pain. We provide three reasons why the conclusions reached by Key are unsupported. They consider (i) why it is not sufficient to conclude that only human neural structures can process conscious pain, (ii) why an understanding of pain in humans and non-human animals needs to be based within a framework of consciousness, and (iii) evidence already exists that fish treated with noxious stimuli lose the ability to perform normal behaviours: This was a behavioral …
Going Beyond Just-So Stories, Brian Key
Going Beyond Just-So Stories, Brian Key
Animal Sentience
Colloquial arguments for fish feeling pain are deeply rooted in anthropometric tendencies that confuse escape responses to noxious stimuli with evidence for consciousness. More developed arguments often rely on just-so stories of fish displaying complex behaviours as proof of consciousness. In response to commentaries on the idea that fish do not feel pain, I raise the need to go beyond just-so stories and to rigorously analyse the neural circuitry responsible for specific behaviours using new and emerging technologies in neuroscience. By deciphering the causal relationship between neural information processing and conscious behaviour, it should be possible to assess cogently the …
The Object Of Grief, Clark Glymour
The Object Of Grief, Clark Glymour
Animal Sentience
King’s new book is a wonderful collection of diverse anecdotes illustrating the variety of animal practices that are convincing illustrations of grief. Those who want scientific arguments for that conclusion should, however, read elsewhere.
An Invertebrate Perspective On Pain, Jennifer A. Mather
An Invertebrate Perspective On Pain, Jennifer A. Mather
Animal Sentience
Although Key (2016) argues that mammals feel pain and fish do not, from an invertebrate perspective, it is obvious that the pain experience is shared by animals from a number of different animal groups.
Nonhuman Mind-Reading Ability, Marthe Kiley-Worthington
Nonhuman Mind-Reading Ability, Marthe Kiley-Worthington
Animal Sentience
Harnad (2016) is mistaken that humans are better at mind-reading than other species. Humans have context-independent language, but nonhuman species, especially mammals, have context-dependent nonverbal skills – perceptual, communicative and social -- that can be much keener than our own.
Considering Animals’ Feelings: Précis Of Sentience And Animal Welfare (Broom 2014), Donald M. Broom
Considering Animals’ Feelings: Précis Of Sentience And Animal Welfare (Broom 2014), Donald M. Broom
Animal Sentience
The concept of sentience concerns the capacity to have feelings. There is evidence for sophisticated cognitive concepts and for both positive and negative feelings in a wide range of nonhuman animals. All vertebrates, including fish, as well as some molluscs and decapod crustaceans have pain systems. Most people today consider that their moral obligations extend to many animal species. Moral decisions about abortion, euthanasia, and the various ways we protect animals should take into account the research findings about sentience. In addition, all animal life should be respected and studies of the welfare of even the simplest invertebrate animals should …
Sentience And Animal Welfare: Affirming The Science And Addressing The Skepticism, Nancy Clarke
Sentience And Animal Welfare: Affirming The Science And Addressing The Skepticism, Nancy Clarke
Animal Sentience
Broom’s (2014) book is a well-researched and thoroughly written exploration and evaluation of the journey from the origins of animal welfare science to what we can say we now know and need to consider in relation to animal sentience and welfare. This book will help to counter any skepticism among academics and policy makers.
Hermes In The Anthropocene: A Dogologue, Karen Malpede
Hermes In The Anthropocene: A Dogologue, Karen Malpede
Animal Sentience
In this dogologue, a writer and the dog who sits near her desk as she works speak. The dog is concerned about the fate of the world in the hands of humans. His urgent questions send the writer into the world of her own memories when she was a child alone with a horse in nature.