Attention Bias: A novel method to assess psychological well-being in group-housed non-human primates

Aims

This research aims to develop and validate a new measure of the psychological state of captive group-housed non-human primates as a means for improving their welfare.

Background

A better understanding of emotions and feelings in animals is critical to animal welfare science. Psychologically healthy animals will be happier, healthier, less stressed, more likely to learn protocols, and provide robust and reproducible data. However, measuring psychological well-being in animals is intrinsically difficult and existing indicators of well-being focus on indirect physiological or behavioural measures that have a number of limitations.

This project will adapt, refine and validate a state-of-the-art welfare assessment tool, based on 'attention bias' (AB), that is the tendency to pay attention to emotionally dominant stimuli and ignore other stimuli, associated with vulnerability to clinical levels of anxiety, and impaired psychological wellbeing.

Research details and methods

Measuring attention bias, linked to underlying emotional states in both humans and captive primate, will be used as the basis of the test.

The project builds upon previous work where individually-housed captive rhesus macaques are presented images of neutral and aggressive macaque faces and their gaze towards either of these images is filmed, or otherwise observed, to measure their AB; their tendency to focus on stimuli (aggressive faces) that reinforces their negative mood.

This will be developed for use with group-housed macaques to provide an easily applied tool that can be implemented by care staff to assess psychological wellbeing in animals living in social groups. The approach will then be validated as a measure of psychological state by triangulating AB scores with behavioural and physiological state indicators and genetic trait indicators of emotion and wellbeing.