Perspectives on assessing the emotional behavior of animals with behavior problems

Abstract

The field of clinical animal behavior has a growing scientific basis, with three main paradigms having different perspectives on the assessment of animal emotion. The Behavioral approach, grounded in classical behaviorism, makes little reference to emotion in assessment, despite covert recognition of its importance. The Medical approach, drawing on human psychiatric approaches, emphasizes the importance of physical evidence (behavior descriptions and physiological parameters) for validation of diagnoses centred on abnormality and disorder. The more recent Psychobiological approach synthesizes affective neuroscience, ethology and psychology to propose a systematic and rational framework for making inferences about emotion, that result in the construction of testable (falsifiable) hypotheses relating to four domains derived from component process theory using field-based evidence.

Developing Diagnostic Frameworks in Veterinary Behavioral Medicine: Disambiguating Separation Related Problems in Dogs

“…This means it is necessary to make reference to not only the behaviors of the syndrome and their context, but also their motivational and emotional basis (29). Motivation and emotion can only be inferred from less direct measures and so they remain hypothetical constructs, but they should be amenable to falsification in accordance with the scientific method (42).…”

“…They were asked what clinical meaning, if any they might attach to these groupings and to interpret, as far as possible, in terms of possible underlying emotion, motivation or severity. All clinicians were familiar with the approach described in Mills (42) for distinguishing motivation (behavioral goal) from emotion (personal functional relationship with stimulus) and triangulating evidence in relation to four components of emotion in order to make a diagnostic assessment on the basis of the scientific principle of falsification.…”

Development and Psychometric Validation of the Lincoln Canine Anxiety Scale

“…While in adults self-report is the standard, the routine assessment by proxies (parents or other closely related persons) for children shows that reporting by others can be a valid way to assess these conditions (2). As dogs cannot verbally express their internal states, systematic observations of their behavior, and physiology (e.g., pupil dilation, panting) in relation to a given context are often used to infer underlying state (9). However, while such approaches may be useful for inferring the presence of a given emotional state, reliably quantifying severity represents a separate challenge.…”

Effectiveness of imepitoin for the control of anxiety and fear associated with noise phobia in dogs

“…Diagnostically, it is useful to separate phobias from normal temporary responses which should be of less concern, but the point “at which a fear becomes a phobia is unknown”; indeed, all data to date indicate that the behavioral response to an aversive event or situation is dimensional in nature and thus the problem exists as a spectrum which includes normality. Even if the paradigm used for conceptualizing problems in veterinary behavioral medicine places noise phobia within the context of a normal (albeit undesirable and potentially extreme) emotional response rather than an artificially constructed medical category, it does not negate the value of psychopharmacological interventions, which could protect the dogs' well‐being or enable behavioral management …”