Simple Summary Cognitive bias testing has emerged as one of the most valid tools in
measuring animals' affective states, and while it has been extensively applied in farm and …

Mood disorders represent one of society's most costly and challenging health burdens. The
drug treatments used today were initially discovered serendipitously in the 1950s. Animal …

Cognitive processes are often biased by emotions. In humans, affective disorders are
accompanied by pessimistic judgement, while optimistic judgement is linked to emotional …

Judgement bias tasks are promising tools to assess emotional valence in animals, however
current designs are often time-consuming and lack aspects of validity. This study aimed to …

Scientific methods for assessing animal affect, especially affective valence (positivity or
negativity), allow us to evaluate animal welfare and the effectiveness of 3Rs Refinements …

Loss of pleasure (clinically referred to as anhedonia), impairments in other reward-related
processes such as reward learning, motivation, and reward valuation, and blunted affect …

Extinction of learning is a common, yet under-reported limitation of judgment bias testing
methods Repeated exposure to the ambiguous probe of a judgment bias paradigm …

Understanding the neurobiology of major depressive disorder (MDD) remains one of the
major challenges in neuroscience. The disease is heterogeneous in nature, and patients …

The identification of cognitive bias has become an important measure of animal welfare.
Negative cognitive biases develop from a tendency for animals to process novel information …

This dissertation describes the development and optimisation of a set of touchscreen tasks
for the assessment of motivation and reinforcement processes in mice. Changes in …