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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Plant Sentience: "Feeling" Or Biological Automatism?, Andrea Mastinu
Plant Sentience: "Feeling" Or Biological Automatism?, Andrea Mastinu
Animal Sentience
Sentience refers to the ability of an organism to have subjective experiences such as sensations, emotions and awareness. Whereas some animals, including humans, are widely recognized as sentient, the question of whether plants are sentient is still debated among scientists, philosophers, and ethicists. Over the past 20 years, many scientists such as Trewavas, Baluška, Mancuso, Gagliano, and Calvo have reported interesting discussions about memory, behavior, communication, and intelligence in plants. However, the reported conclusions have not convinced the entire scientific community. In this commentary, I would like to focus on two critical aspects related to sentience: cognition and emotion
Time To Stop Pretending We Don’T Know Other Animals Are Sentient Beings, Marc Bekoff
Time To Stop Pretending We Don’T Know Other Animals Are Sentient Beings, Marc Bekoff
Animal Sentience
Rowan et al.’s target article is an outstanding review of some of the history of the science of sentience, but one would have liked to see a much stronger “call to action.” We don’t need any more data to know that many other animals are sentient beings whose lives must be protected from harm in a wide variety of contexts. It is not anti-science to want more action on behalf of other animals right now.
Inferring Emotion From Amygdala Activation Alone Is Problematic, Thomas F. Denson
Inferring Emotion From Amygdala Activation Alone Is Problematic, Thomas F. Denson
Animal Sentience
Cook et al. investigated neural responses in domestic dogs in an experiment designed to elicit jealousy. Relative to a control condition, watching the dogs’ caregivers feed a fake dog activated the amygdala bilaterally. Dogs rated higher in dog-directed aggressiveness showed larger initial amygdala activation. Amygdala activity in this context is insufficient evidence to infer that the dogs experienced jealousy or even negative affect. The experimental design does not provide an adequate level of control to infer the presence of jealousy.
Are Chicken Minds Special?, Rafael Freire, Susan J. Hazel
Are Chicken Minds Special?, Rafael Freire, Susan J. Hazel
Animal Sentience
The number of publications on chicken cognition and emotion exceeds that on most birds and is comparable to the number of publications on some more “advanced” mammals. We argue that the chicken is an excellent model for this type of research because of (1) the presence of well-established fundamental mental processes in the chicken, (2) a challenging ethological environment and (3) social pressures that may have facilitated the evolution of cognitive abilities similar to those of some mammals. Marino’s (2017) review provides an excellent foundation for the continued study of complex mental abilities in this species.
Do We Understand What It Means For Dogs To Experience Emotion?, Lasana T. Harris
Do We Understand What It Means For Dogs To Experience Emotion?, Lasana T. Harris
Animal Sentience
Psychologists who study humans struggle to agree on a definition of emotion, falling primarily into two camps. Though recent neuroscience advances are beginning to settle this ancient debate, it cannot solve the private-language problem at the heart of inferences about social cognition. This suggests that when we consider the emotional experiences of other species like canines, biological and physiological homologs do not provide enough evidence of emotional experiences similar to those of humans. Secondary complex emotional experiences are even more difficult to attribute to non-humans since such experiences rely, by definition, on social cognition. Given the contextual differences between human-human …
Animal And Human Emotion: Concepts And Methodologies, Cátia Correia Caeiro
Animal And Human Emotion: Concepts And Methodologies, Cátia Correia Caeiro
Animal Sentience
The human-dog relationship is particularly interesting for the study of emotions. The underlying concepts need to be made explicit and methods need to be adapted to the characteristics of the species studied as well as the shortcomings of the human experimenter’s perception.
Operationalizing Fear Through Understanding Vigilance, Ralph Adolphs
Operationalizing Fear Through Understanding Vigilance, Ralph Adolphs
Animal Sentience
Beauchamp’s target article raises important questions about the features that often accompany fear. How reliable an indicator of fear is vigilance? Is it constitutive, cause, or consequence of fear? These questions force us towards a clearer definition of “fear.”
In Praise Of Fishes: Précis Of What A Fish Knows (Balcombe 2016), Jonathan Balcombe
In Praise Of Fishes: Précis Of What A Fish Knows (Balcombe 2016), Jonathan Balcombe
Animal Sentience
Our relationship to fishes in the modern era is deeply problematic. We kill and consume more of them than any other group of vertebrates. At the same time, advances in our knowledge of fishes and their capabilities are gaining speed. Fish species diversity exceeds that of all other vertebrates combined, with a wide range of sensory adaptations, some of them (e.g., geomagnetism, water pressure and movement detection, and communication via electricity) alien to our own sensory experience. The evidence for pain in fishes (despite persistent detractors) is strongly supported by anatomical, physiological and behavioral studies. It is likely that fishes …
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 …
Animal Mourning: Précis Of How Animals Grieve (King 2013), Barbara J. King
Animal Mourning: Précis Of How Animals Grieve (King 2013), Barbara J. King
Animal Sentience
Abstract: When an animal dies, that individual’s mate, relatives, or friends may express grief. Changes in the survivor’s patterns of social behavior, eating, sleeping, and/or of expression of affect are the key criteria for defining grief. Based on this understanding of grief, it is not only big-brained mammals like elephants, apes, and cetaceans who can be said to mourn, but also a wide variety of other animals, including domestic companions like cats, dogs, and rabbits; horses and farm animals; and some birds. With keen attention placed on seeking where grief is found to occur and where it is absent …
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 …