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Evaluation of animal welfare by the self-expression of an anxiety state.

Although mental well-being has long been accepted as an important aspect of animal welfare, the subjective feelings of farm or laboratory animals are regarded as lying beyond the scope of scientific enquiry. We now report that pharmacological conditioning of pigs with a drug, pentylenetetrazole, known to induce anxiety in man, permits investigation of the presence or absence of this psychological state during exposure to a variety of environmental stimuli encountered during normal husbandry. Such pharmacological conditioning therefore provides a valuable means to assess and improve elements of animal welfare and should be applicable to other species that show operant behaviour.

Animal Husbandry↗

An examination of the African American experience of everyday discrimination and symptoms of psychological distress.

Current theoretical models suggest that the most potent and impacting discrimination experienced by African Americans in the post Jim Crow era are subtle and unconscious forms of discrimination that are experienced on a daily basis. This study investigates the relationship between perceived everyday discrimination and anxiety and depressive symptoms. Further, we examine gender as a moderator of this relationship. Data come from the 1995 Detroit Area Study data with 570 African American respondents. Results indicate that perceived discrimination is directly related to both symptoms of depression and anxiety. Gender moderates the relationship between discrimination and anxiety symptoms, but not discrimination and depressive symptoms. Overall, different patterns of relationships were apparent for men and women.

Activities of Daily Living↗

Detection of feigned mental disorders on the personality assessment inventory: a discriminant analysis.

Psychological assessment with multiscale inventories is largely dependent on the honesty and forthrightness of those persons evaluated. We investigated the effectiveness of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) in detecting participants feigning three specific disorders: schizophrenia, major depression, and generalized anxiety disorder. With a simulation design, we tested the PAI validity scales on 166 naive (undergraduates with minimal preparation) and 80 sophisticated (doctoral psychology students with 1 week preparation) participants. We compared their results to persons with the designated disorders: schizophrenia (n = 45), major depression (n = 136), and generalized anxiety disorder (n = 40). Although moderately effective with naive simulators, the validity scales evidenced only modest positive predictive power with their sophisticated counterparts. Therefore, we performed a two-stage discriminant analysis that yielded a moderately high hit rate (> 80%) that was maintained in the cross-validation sample, irrespective of the feigned disorder or the sophistication of the simulators.

Adult↗

The role of nicotinic receptor beta-2 subunits in nicotine discrimination and conditioned taste aversion.

The subtypes of nicotinic receptors at which the behavioural effects of nicotine originate are not fully understood. These experiments use mice lacking the beta2 subunit of nicotinic receptors to investigate its role in nicotine discrimination and conditioned taste aversion (CTA). Wild-type and mutant mice were trained either in a two-lever nicotine discrimination procedure using a tandem schedule of food reinforcement, or in a counterbalanced two-flavour CTA procedure. Rates of lever-pressing of wild-type and mutant mice did not differ. Wild-type mice acquired discrimination of nicotine (0.4 or 0.8 mg/kg) rapidly and exhibited steep dose-response curves. Mutant mice failed to acquire these nicotine discriminations and exhibited flat dose-response curves. Both wild-type and mutant mice acquired discrimination of nicotine (1.6 mg/kg) although discrimination performance was weak in the mutants. Nicotine initially reduced response rates in wild-type and mutant mice, and tolerance developed to this effect in each genotype. Both genotypes acquired discrimination of morphine (3 mg/kg) with similar degrees of accuracy, and dose-response curves for morphine discrimination in the two genotypes were indistinguishable. Nicotine produced dose-related CTA in both genotypes, but the magnitude of the effect was less in the mutants than in the wild-type controls. It is concluded that nicotinic receptors containing the beta2 subunit play a major role in the discriminative stimulus and taste aversion effects of nicotine that may reflect psychological aspects of tobacco dependence. Such receptors appear to have a less crucial role in the response-rate, reducing effects of nicotine and in nicotine tolerance.

Animals↗