Emotions. Impact on learning and behaviour.

Please don’t share this material without my consent. There are 3 types of feelings: - Sensory feelings: taste, cold. We won’t let our animals freeze. - Bodily feelings: hunger, sleepiness. We won’t let our animals starve. - Emotional feelings: fear, happiness. We often ignore these feelings.

Freezing and starving would kill an animal within a very short period of time. Ignoring emotional feelings doesn’t often kill the animal, but will change the individual on a fundamental level. Emotions impact personality, stress sensitivity, social skills and learning. They determine who the animal is.

This module is about how emotional states impact the outcome of training and influences relationships (one of your training assets).

In the 1990s, the field of Affective Neuroscience was born as we learned more through neurological studies of humans and animals in parallel. If you insert electrodes into the brains of human volunteers, and the analogous locations in mammals or birds, and run a small electrical current, emotional feelings can be triggered.

These emotional responses could only be triggered in small and distinct regions in the central part of the brain, and involve different neurotransmitters, different facial expressions, different observable behaviour – and different emotions.

By rummaging around in brains like this, Jaak Panksepp and others found 7 core emotions, written in caps, typically. They’re all about survival and reproduction, and they all influence learning to a heavy degree.

CARE CARE is an emotional state that triggers caregiving behaviours, often including a lot of body contact. When caring for animals, we often get carried away and show physical affection the way WE like it.

Studies have shown that animals often don’t appreciate how we touch them, so carrying out a consent test is a good idea to learn more.

- Watch the animals and see where and how they touch each other in a friendly, relaxed manner. - Offer that type of touch, and then remove your hand so that the animal has a chance to reinitiate contact – or not.

In one study, cats showed a preference for being stroked at their temporal gland. That doesn’t mean that all cats prefer that, there are still individual differences – but it’s a starting point..!

If you want to use touch as a reinforcer in your training, finding the best scratching spot will affect both your training assets: the relationship, and the quality of your available reinforcers.

GRIEF GRIEF is an aversive emotional state triggered by separation. It’s especially important for young animals, however some species continue to be very sensitive to social separation as adults.

Both the physical and the psychological environment are important: being alone in a new place is much worse than being alone in a familiar place: but being with mom in a new place isn’t all that disturbing.

So, from a training perspective it’s interesting to try to quickly make new environments familiar, especially if you need to leave the animal alone for a while in that location. The “home away from home”-concept is helpful here: training the animal to feel safe and comfortable in a crate, or on a particular towel, can be extremely helpful in reducing the GRIEF-response when having to visit the vet’s, for instance.

PLAY PLAY impacts brain development and function, relationships and social skills, inhibits FEAR and leads to place preference: animals prefer places where they have played.

In one study, rats preferred the company of happy adult males who made a lot of happy sounds over grumpy males who made fewer happy sounds. There’s reason to believe that your emotional state (happy/grumpy) influences the animals in your care, too!

There are a bunch of different ways that PLAY could affect training:

- PLAY leads to place preference – if you play in one location the animal will like being there. Very useful for vet visits or competitions. - PLAY inhibits FEAR to some point. You can use PLAY to overshadow potentially frightening stimuli, as long as they’re not too frightening. PLAY at the vet’s, and the animal might not pay too much attention to all the strange smells and noises. - PLAY strengthens the relationship – one of your assets. Playing with the animal, or being around the animal while it’s playing – the animal learns to associate you with happy emotional states. - PLAY is a reinforcer – another asset. Use it to reinforce desired behaviour. - PLAY increases arousal – which sometimes, as in agility training, is desirable. - PLAY improves memory consolidation after training. Playing after a learning session leads quicker to fluency, shortens the re-learning time and improves memory.

LUST LUST is exhibited differently in males and females.

In many species of mammals, males’ sexual interest is triggered by the nearness of females in heat. So, when managing male LUST it’s often about managing external stimuli, and teaching the animal impulse control from a young age.

Females’ sexual behaviour are typically driven by changes in hormonal levels, which cannot be managed in the same way – they are internal stimuli. The same is true for males of some species, too, of course. Teaching the animal impulse control from a young age is equally useful, and recognizing LUST-related behaviour (such as distractibility, aggression, arousal) is important. Although it can be used as a reinforcer in training, most often the emotional state of LUST is a distractor.

SEEKING SEEKING involves vigorous exploration and curiosity, and is activated when animals are looking for resources.

Not when they’re consuming resources.

When researchers first started studying the interplay between animals behaving to find and receive resources and dopamine, the neurotransmitter involved in the SEEKING system, they were surprised.

They expected the rush of dopamine to occur when the animal got the reward. But instead, what they found was that the rush of dopamine occurred when the animal got the signal saying that the reward was available.

In other words, SEEKING is more heavily involved in looking for resources, not finding them.

This is important, because clicker training is about communicating that the reward is available. It’s a conditioned reinforcer, and as such it engages the SEEKING system in a way that primary reinforcers do not.

Engaging the SEEKING system impacts the brain and learning mechanism in three ways: animals learn quicker, they remember better, and they get euphoric.

So, from a neurological perspective, clicker training makes sense – it speeds up your training, since it engages the SEEKING system.

FEAR Many people don’t recognize the subtle signs of FEAR in animals. When the current is on at a really low level, they start moving in slow motion. When it increases, they freeze. At some point, they flee. There are other signs too, of course, depending on the species, but those are more or less universal.

It’s important to learn to recognize the early signs of FEAR, because that’s an emotional state that is problematic in several ways. The most important problems for captive animals are the risk of sensitization (the animal becoming progressively more fearful), and switching into RAGE (the animal becoming dangerous).

Let’s look at two dogs, visiting a vet. Dog A and dog B.

Dog A visits the vet for the first time, gets a shot and goes home. That sets the stage for contextual fear conditioning: that the animal becomes fearful of visiting the vet.

Dog B visits the vet for the first time, gets a treat and goes home. On the next visit, he gets a shot, a treat, and goes home. Dog B is much less likely to develop fear conditioning because the first visit serves to latently inhibit the type of learning, and feeding treats counterconditions him to reduce the aversiveness of the experience.

Prevention is key when it comes to reducing the risk of fear – and the problems associated with fearful experiences.

The way to deal with established fears is to make changes to the environment, or address the animals’ learning.

RAGE Animals end up in RAGE through a few different mechanisms: sensitized through FEAR, by restraint or frustration.

This is a big concern, because not only are animals in RAGE potentially dangerous, but they also learn to use aggressive behaviours to get out of situations they don’t like.

Escalating distress and triggers

I find the concept of triggers very useful when addressing FEAR and RAGE-related behaviour.

Imagine a timeline – the X-axis.

Then on the Y-axis, escalating arousal from green (relaxed) through yellow and orange, increasing arousal, to red (terrified, very distressed).

As triggers occur, the animals’ curve shifts up temporarily. As time passes, they normalize again.

When trigger stacking occurs (triggers occurring so fast that there’s no time for full recovery), animals may go from green to red within a very short period of time, and become dangerous.

In this example, without the first trigger there would be no growling. Without the second trigger, there’d be no biting.

So, triggers are the key. Eliminate the triggers, and eliminate the problem.

Triggers can be addressed at several levels. Dealing with triggers is about preventing stimuli from developing into potential triggers, removing triggers, overshadowing them or transforming them. The details of those techniques are beyond the scope of this course, but will be covered in the Solving Behavioural Problems course.

Removing even a single trigger may eliminate a biting incident, so it’s important to know what the triggers are, and try remove them from the situation.

Core Affect Space Understanding Core emotions is really important, but it’s not the whole story. We can also conceptualize emotions on a two-dimensional scale, with valence (how much we like or dislike the emotion) on one axis, and arousal (how soon and intensely we respond to stimuli) on the other axis.

In Core Affect Space, we can map out all kinds of emotions, motivations and sensations in this two- dimensional space.

What’s more, we can look at how different training approaches move the animal through core affect space.

When we add resources, animals become happy and excited: positive reinforcement tends to move animals to the top right corner of Core Affect Space.

When we remove resources, that’s unpleasant and animals typically give up to conserve energy at some point: negative punishment moves the animal to the other side of the diagonal: the bottom left corner.

When we add aversives, it’s unpleasant, and arousal increases. Positive punishment pushes the animal towards the top left corner.

When we remove aversives, the animal may relax, it’s more pleasant than when the aversive was present, and arousal diminishes too. If carried out correctly, negative reinforcement pushes animals to the bottom right of core affect space.

The right side of the matrix is associated with improved welfare, and spending too much time on the left side diminishes welfare.

Having said that, animals live in a world where bad things happen on occasion, and it’s important that they can cope with the rare bad day. One of the best ways of ensuring this is to use positive reinforcement training: this empowers the animals to make decisions and have the confidence to solve problems.

Emotions and learning Emotions influence learning in several ways. Animals learn through classical conditioning to associate previously neutral stimuli with emotional responses, so they start having those emotions even in the absence of the original trigger, as long as the previously neutral, now conditioned, stimulus is present.

Interestingly, arousal impacts learning in an inverted U-curve. No learning (or very little) occurs at extreme arousal levels, both very low levels, and very high levels.

In other words, when the animal is really stressed, such as when being restrained at the vet’s, he might not be able to respond even to well-known cues.

He’s not stubborn.

He’s too aroused to be able to perform, or learn, operant behaviours. In order to help him and reach through to him, you need to help him reduce arousal – typically by reducing FEAR.