Cancer blues? A promising judgment bias task indicates pessimism in nude mice with tumors

Development of an IntelliCage based Cognitive Bias Test for Mice

“…So far, only Resasco and colleagues were able to measure an influence of housing conditions on cognitive bias in mice. Unlike to our study, enriched housed mice seemed to have a positive expectancy related to the ambiguous stimulus compared to standard housed mice (Resasco et al, 2021).…”

“…Further cognitive bias test methods followed in which mice were conditioned to spatial positions (Bailoo et al, 2018; Kloke et al, 2014; Novak et al, 2015; Verjat et al, 2021), to tactile stimuli (Novak et al, 2016), to different tunnel lengths (Krakenberg et al, 2019), to auditory stimuli (Jones et al, 2017), to olfactory stimuli (Resasco et al, 2021), or in an automated touchscreen-based set-up presenting different patterns on a screen (Krakenberg et al, 2019A). These studies showed that mice could be conditioned to the different stimuli and that the data plotted on the axis of stimuli increasing from negative to positive result in a sigmoidal curve (increasing s-shape slopes from the negative to the positive stimulus).…”

Application of Cognitive Bias Testing in Neuropsychiatric Disorders: A Mini-Review Based on Animal Studies

“…Chronic neuropathic pain caused by saphenous nerve injury leads to a negative bias which can be corrected by gabapentin as tested by the ABT, and a reward deficit in developing value-based memory bias in the mABT (Phelps et al, 2021), suggesting that rats with chronic neuropathic pain experience negative emotions and deficits in sensitivity to reward value. In addition, a study using the JBT to examine cancer pain and discomfort in mice with tumors found that tumor-bearing male mice were more pessimistic than healthy controls (Resasco et al, 2021). In sum, these studies indicate that cognitive bias tests can effectively measure the negative emotional state caused by pain in animals from acute pain to chronic pain and that analgesics can partially correct this state, therefore can be used in the validation of therapeutic approaches.…”

Research Before Policy: Identifying Gaps in Salmonid Welfare Research That Require Further Study to Inform Evidence-Based Aquaculture Guidelines in Canada

“…Further, validated tests of judgment bias, a concept borrowed from human psychology in which one's underlying mood state affects whether neutral stimuli are perceived as potentially rewarding (optimistic) or threatening [pessimistic; e.g., (194)], are gaining popularity for assessing non-human animal mood states [e.g., (195)]. For example, a judgment bias task was recently validated for laboratory mice, wherein mice housed with preferred and welfareimproving environmental enrichment and tumor-bearing nude mice showed optimistic and pessimistic responses, respectively (196). Judgment bias tasks have been attempted for zebrafish [e.g., (197)], but a validated method for salmonids has yet to emerge.…”