scholarly journals Investigation of a Standardized Qualitative Behaviour Assessment and Exploration of Potential Influencing Factors on the Emotional State of Dairy Calves

Animals ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (10) ◽  
pp. 757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Brscic ◽  
Nina Dam Otten ◽  
Barbara Contiero ◽  
Marlene Katharina Kirchner

Assessing emotional states of dairy calves is an essential part of welfare assessment, but standardized protocols are absent. The present study aims at assessing the emotional states of dairy calves and establishing a reliable standard procedure with Qualitative Behavioral Assessment (QBA) and 20 defined terms. Video material was used to compare multiple observer results. Further, live observations were performed on 49 dairy herds in Denmark and Italy. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) identified observer agreement and QBA dimensions (PC). For achieving overall welfare judgment, PC1-scores were turned into the Welfare Quality (WQ) criterion ‘Positive Emotional State’. Finally, farm factors’ influence on the WQ criterion was evaluated by mixed linear models. PCA summarized QBA descriptors as PC1 ‘Valence’ and PC2 ‘Arousal’ (explained variation 40.3% and 13.3%). The highest positive descriptor loadings on PC1 was Happy (0.92) and Nervous (0.72) on PC2. The WQ-criterion score (WQ-C12) was on average 51.1 ± 9.0 points (0: worst to 100: excellent state) and ‘Number of calves’, ‘Farming style’, and ‘Breed’ explained 18% of the variability of it. We conclude that the 20 terms achieved a high portion of explained variation providing a differentiated view on the emotional state of calves. The defined term list proved to need good training for observer agreement.

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Bühlmann ◽  
Susanne Schlüter-Müller ◽  
Lukas Fürer ◽  
Martin Steppan ◽  
Marc Birkhölzer ◽  
...  

Abstract Introduction Patient suicidality is a frequently experienced topic for psychotherapists. Especially adolescents with borderline personality pathology (BPP) often exhibit suicidal tendencies. Previous research which examined therapists’ countertransference towards suicidal patients suggested that therapists are negatively affected and distressed by them. We hypothesize that this emotional response of the therapists is related to specific sessions in which suicidality came up as a topic. Accordingly, the objective of this study consists in examining therapists’ emotional state on a session level of analysis. Methods The sample consisted of N = 21 adolescents (age 13–19 years) with BPD or subthreshold BPD. Therapists’ emotional states were measured in n = 418 sessions using the Session Evaluation Questionnaire. Principal component analysis was used to reduce dimensionality of the therapist response. The emotional states were compared depending on whether suicidality has been addressed in the session (SS) or not (NSS). Results Two components could be identified. Firstly, therapists were more aroused, excited, afraid, angry and uncertain after SS than after NSS. Secondly, therapists were more aroused, excited, definite and pleased after SS than after NSS. Discussion: Suicidality does not always have to be a burden for therapists: Both a “distress” and an “eustress” component occur in this context from which the latter is supposed to help clinicians master a difficult situation. Since countertransference feelings are often not fully conscious, it is necessary to do research on therapists’ emotional states after sessions in which suicidality is addressed. This is crucial to both prevent the therapeutic process from being endangered and preserve clinicians’ mental health. Clinical implications and limitations are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zu Soh ◽  
Motoki Matsuno ◽  
Masayuki Yoshida ◽  
Akira Furui ◽  
Toshio Tsuji

AbstractFear, anxiety, and preference in fish are generally evaluated by video-based behavioural analyses. We previously proposed a system that can measure bioelectrical signals, called ventilatory signals, using a 126-electrode array placed at the bottom of an aquarium and achieved cameraless real-time analysis of motion and ventilation. In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the emotional state of fish by combining the motion and ventilatory indices obtained with the proposed system. In the experiments, fear/anxiety and appetitive behaviour were induced using alarm pheromone and ethanol, respectively. We also found that the emotional state of the zebrafish can be expressed on the principal component (PC) space extracted from the defined indices. The three emotional states were discriminated using a model-based machine learning method by feeding the PCs. Based on discrimination performed every 5 s, the F-score between the three emotional states were as follows: 0.84 for the normal state, 0.76 for the fear/anxiety state, and 0.59 for the appetitive behaviour. These results indicate the effectiveness of combining physiological and motional indices to discriminate the emotional states of zebrafish.


PeerJ ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. e2364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shun Li ◽  
Liqing Cui ◽  
Changye Zhu ◽  
Baobin Li ◽  
Nan Zhao ◽  
...  

Automatic emotion recognition is of great value in many applications, however, to fully display the application value of emotion recognition, more portable, non-intrusive, inexpensive technologies need to be developed. Human gaits could reflect the walker’s emotional state, and could be an information source for emotion recognition. This paper proposed a novel method to recognize emotional state through human gaits by using Microsoft Kinect, a low-cost, portable, camera-based sensor. Fifty-nine participants’ gaits under neutral state, induced anger and induced happiness were recorded by two Kinect cameras, and the original data were processed through joint selection, coordinate system transformation, sliding window gauss filtering, differential operation, and data segmentation. Features of gait patterns were extracted from 3-dimentional coordinates of 14 main body joints by Fourier transformation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The classifiers NaiveBayes, RandomForests, LibSVM and SMO (Sequential Minimal Optimization) were trained and evaluated, and the accuracy of recognizing anger and happiness from neutral state achieved 80.5% and 75.4%. Although the results of distinguishing angry and happiness states were not ideal in current study, it showed the feasibility of automatically recognizing emotional states from gaits, with the characteristics meeting the application requirements.


2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Maire ◽  
Renaud Brochard ◽  
Jean-Luc Kop ◽  
Vivien Dioux ◽  
Daniel Zagar

Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 624-631
Author(s):  
Chang-You LIU ◽  
Bao-Jie FAN ◽  
Zhi-Min CAO ◽  
Yan WANG ◽  
Zhi-Xiao ZHANG ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalia Albuquerque ◽  
Daniel S. Mills ◽  
Kun Guo ◽  
Anna Wilkinson ◽  
Briseida Resende

AbstractThe ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs’ responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors’ emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.


BMC Nursing ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Messineo ◽  
Luciano Seta ◽  
Mario Allegra

Abstract Background The efficient management of relational competences in healthcare professionals is crucial to ensuring that a patient’s treatment and care process is conducted positively. Empathy is a major component of the relational skills expected of health professionals. Knowledge of undergraduate healthcare students’ empathic abilities is important for educators in designing specific and efficient educational programmes aimed at supporting or enhancing such competences. In this study, we measured first-year undergraduate nursing students’ attitudes towards professional empathy in clinical encounters. The students’ motivations for entering nursing education were also evaluated. This study takes a multi-method approach based on the use of qualitative and quantitative tools to examine the association between students’ positive attitudes towards the value of empathy in health professionals and their prosocial and altruistic motivations in choosing to engage in nursing studies. Methods A multi-method study was performed with 77 first-year nursing students. The Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) – Health Professions Student Version was administered. Students’ motivations for choosing nursing studies were detected through an open question and thematically analysed. Using explorative factor analysis and principal component analysis, a dimensional reduction was conducted to identify subjects with prosocial and altruistic motivations. Finally, linear models were tested to examine specific associations between motivation and empathy. Results Seven distinct themes distinguishing internal and external motivational factors were identified through a thematic analysis of students’ answers regarding their decision to enter a nursing degree course. Female students gained higher scores on the empathy scale than male ones. When students’ age was considered, this difference was only observed for younger students, with young females’ total scores being higher than young males'. High empathy scores were positively associated with altruistic motivational factors. A negative correlation was found between external motivational factors and the scores of the Compassionate Care subscale of the JSE. Conclusions Knowing the level of nursing students’ empathy and their motivational factors for entering nursing studies is important for educators to implement training paths that enhance students’ relational attitudes and skills and promote the positive motivational aspects that are central to this profession.


1990 ◽  
Vol 73 (6) ◽  
pp. 1612-1624 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.L. Foulley ◽  
D. Gianola ◽  
M. San Cristobal ◽  
S. Im

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document