Evaluation of a novel translational task for assessing emotional biases in different species

Abstract

Changes in the processing of emotional information are key features of affective disorders. Neuropsychological tests based on emotional faces or words are used to detect emotional/affective biases in humans, but these tests are not applicable to animal species. In the present study, we investigated whether a novel affective tone discrimination task (ATDT), developed to study emotion-related behaviour in rats, could also be used to quantify changes in affective states in humans. To date, the methods used in human neuropsychology have not been applicable to animal experiments. Participants completed a training session in which they learnt to discriminate specific tone frequencies and to correctly respond in order to gain emotionally valenced outcomes, to obtain rewards (money), or to avoid punishment (an aversive sound clip). During a subsequent test session, additional ambiguous probe tones were presented at frequencies intermediate between the reward and avoidance paired tones. At the end of the task, participants completed self-report questionnaires. All participants made more avoidance responses to the most ambiguous tone cues, suggesting a bias towards avoidance of punishment. Individual differences in the degrees of bias observed were correlated with anxiety measures, suggesting the task's sensitivity to differences in state anxiety within a healthy population. Further studies in clinical populations will be necessary to assess the task's sensitivity to pathological anxiety states.These data suggest that this affective tone discrimination task provides a novel method to study cognitive affective biases in different species, including humans, and offers a novel assessment to study anxiety.

Neural correlates of valence generalization in an affective conditioning paradigm

“…On the third level, current positive and negative affect were entered as state variables. Further, we report Pearson correlation coefficients of the bias score and trait anxiety and rumination as both variables have been found to correlate with interpretation bias [18,22]. We used an adjusted p-level of p < .008 corrected for the 6 questionnaire scales.…”

“…We computed a hierarchical regression to investigate whether state and trait variables predicted the bias score. To this end, trait anxiety (STAIT sum score) was entered at the first level as anxiety has been reported to correlate with interpretative bias [22]. On the second level, we entered the RSQ sum score since both RSQ subscales (reflection and brooding) correlated with each other and have previously been reported to correlate with interpretative bias [18].…”

“…Further, it might serve as a translational tool in validating animal models of these disorders. Translating this paradigm to human participants has revealed a link between interpretation bias and anxiety [22] as well as depression-related ruminative coping style [18]. Schick and colleagues [18] assessed brain activity by means of electroencephalography (EEG) during the ambiguous cue conditioning task and revealed decreased late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes after ambiguous tones compared to both reference tones, indicating differences in affective salience of intermediate tones.…”

Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) fail to learn abstract cues of differential outcomes in a novel cognitive bias test

“…Although cognitive bias paradigms have been presented to a variety of species ranging from honeybees (Anderson, Hardcastle, Munafò, & Robinson., 2012) to monkeys (Bethell et al, 2012;Pomerantz, Terkel, Suomi, & Paukner, 2012), only a handful of studies have investigated cognitive bias in apes; in chimpanzees (Allritz, Call, & Borkenau, 2016;Bateson & Nettle, 2015) and our own previous work with gorillas (McGuire, Vonk, Fuller, & Allard, 2017a;McGuire, Vonk, & Johnson-Ulrich, 2017b). We were interested in assessing emotional states in a group of bachelor silverback gorillas because they comprise a relatively young group of silverback gorillas that spend a fair bit of time engaging in agonistic behavior, as they attempt to shift or reaffirm their position in the dominance hierarchy.…”

The relationship between personality and cognitionin the fowl, Gallus gallus

“…Additionally, it is difficult to know what an optimal response to an intermediate cue between two learnt cues should be and it is not clear that an optimal response that gives most gain in the short-term will do so in the longterm (McNamara et al 2011). For results to meaningful and interpretable, it is important that test paradigms are developed with a specific species in mind (Anderson et al 2012). Further, when interpreting results, differences in study design must be considered.…”