Sandra Düpjan

• Dr
• Scientist at Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN)

Good management and improved standards of animal welfare are discussed as important ways of reducing the risk of infection in farm animals without medication. Increasing evidence from both humans and animals suggests that environments that promote wellbeing over stress and positive over negative emotions can reduce susceptibility to disease and/or...

Vocal expression of emotions has been observed across species and could provide a non-invasive and reliable means to assess animal emotions. We investigated if pig vocal indicators of emotions revealed in previous studies are valid across call types and contexts, and could potentially be used to develop an automated emotion monitoring tool. We perf...

Both humans and nonhuman animals need to show self-control and wait for a larger or better reward instead of a smaller or less preferred but instant reward on an everyday basis. We investigated whether this ability undergoes ontogenetic development in domestic pigs (similar to what is known in human infants) by testing if and for how long nine- and...

The growing recognition of animals as individuals has broader implications for farm animal welfare research. Even under highly standardized on-farm conditions, farm animals show heterogeneous but individually consistent behavioural patterns towards various stimuli, based on how they appraise these stimuli. As a result, animal welfare is likely to b...

Modern pig housing environments provide animals with essential resources, but from an animal’s point of view, they are quite barren and deprive them of the opportunity to make full use of their natural behavioural repertoire and actively work for these resources. The lack of stimulation resulting from such environments compromises animal welfare. T...

In humans, speech perception is lateralized, with the left hemisphere of the brain dominant in processing the communicative content and the right hemisphere dominant in processing the emotional content. However, still little is known about such a division of tasks in other species. We therefore investigated lateralized processing of communicative a...

Altering one’s emotional state in response to the emotional expressions of others, called emotional contagion, is a well-studied phenomenon in humans and many nonhuman animals. Here we describe the methods that are typically used to assess changes in the emotional state in demonstrators and the transmission of emotions to naïve observers. We then r...

Emotions, unlike mood, are short-lived reactions associated with specific events. They can be characterized by two main dimensions, their arousal (bodily activation) and valence (negative versus positive). Knowledge of the valence of emotions experienced by domestic and captive animals is crucial for assessing and improving their welfare, as it ena...

Emotions, unlike mood, are short-lived reactions associated with specific events. They can be characterized by two main dimensions, their arousal (bodily activation) and valence (negative versus positive). Knowledge of the valence of emotions experienced by domestic and captive animals is crucial for assessing and improving their welfare, as it ena...

The observation of laterality –hemispheric asymmetries in structure and/or function– is a promising non-invasive approach to better understand animal affect since it can give insight into cerebral processes underlying the key components of emotions. The emotional valence hypothesis states that positive emotions are mostly processed by the left hemi...

Oestrus detection remains a problem in the dairy cattle industry. Therefore, automatic detection systems have been developed to detect specific behavioural changes at oestrus. Vocal behaviour has not been considered in such automatic oestrus detection systems in cattle, though the vocalisation rate is known to increase during oestrus. The main chal...

Understanding animal emotions is an important scientific and ethical question but assessing emotional valence is still considered challenging. As the observation of lateralization (hemispheric asymmetries in structure and/or function) can provide insight into the underlying processes of the cognitive, physiological and behavioural components of emo...

Studying emotional lateralization is a promising noninvasive approach for investigating and even improving animal welfare. According to the emotional valence hypothesis, the left hemisphere processes positive emotions while the right hemisphere processes negative emotions. This hypothesis could help comprehending lateralized processing of emotional...

Animal individuality is challenging to explain because individual differences are regulated by multiple selective forces that lead to unique combinations of characteristics. For instance, the study of personality, a core aspect of individuality, may benefit from integrating other factors underlying individual differences, such as lateralised cerebr...

Emotions can be defined as an individual's affective reaction to an external and/or internal event that, in turn, generates a simultaneous cascade of behavioral, physiological, and cognitive changes. Those changes that can be perceived by conspecifics have the potential to also affect other's emotional states, a process labeled as “emotional contag...

The reliable detection of estrus is an important scientific and practical challenge in dairy cattle farming. Female vocalization may indicate reproductive status, and preliminary evidence suggests that this information can be used to detect estrus in dairy cattle. The aim of this study was to associate the changes in the vocalization rate of dairy...

Motor lateralization is hypothesized to depend on the complexity of the motor function, but it might at the same time reflect hemispheric dominance within an individual across motor functions. We investigated possible motor lateralization patterns in four motor functions of different complexity (snout use in a manipulative task, foot use in two-ste...

Vocalizations have long been recognized to encode information about an individual's emotional state and, as such, have contributed to the study of emotions in animals. However, the potential of vocalizations to also encode information about an individual's emotional reactivity has received much less attention. In this study, we aimed to test whethe...

In order to protect farm animal welfare, one first needs to establish a working definition of the term , welfare', i.e. the society needs to agree on what comprises welfare; then, valid indicators are needed to evaluate it. This article first lays out a definition of welfare, and then intro-duces several welfare indicators in pigs, with a special f...

The assessment and provision of welfare in farm animals has become a major issue in animal science. A key element for providing good welfare is the enabling of positive affective states in the animals. As the serotonergic system plays a central role in regulating affective behavior, an increase in centrally available serotonin (5-HT) via dietary su...

Cognitive and affective processes are highly interrelated. This has implications for neuropsychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder in humans but also for the welfare of non-human animals. The brain serotonergic system might play a key role in mediating the relationship between cognitive functions and affective regulation. The aim of...

Immer mehr Studien nutzen die Erfassung kognitiver Bewertungstendenzen („cognitive bias“) zur Bestimmung affektiver Zustände. Die zugrunde liegenden physiologischen Mechanismen sind allerdings noch weitgehend ungeklärt. Die hier vorgestellte Studie setzt am serotonergen System an, wobei durch pharmakologische Manipulation die Serotoninverfügbarkeit...

Zusammenfassung Serotonin, das aus der essentiellen Aminosäure Tryptophan (TRP) gebildet wird, ist so-wohl in die Steuerung der Nahrungsaufnahme als auch in die Regulation affektiver Zu-stände involviert. Ob eine TRP-Supplementierung der Nahrung und damit verbunden eine Erhöhung der TRP-und Serotoninkonzentration im Gehirn auch den affektiven Zusta...

Public concern for farm animal welfare calls for reliable scientific tools to measure it. Measuring cognitive bias, i.e., the influence of affective states on cognitive processing, has gained importance during recent years. The one most often adapted experimental design to test cognitive bias in non-human animals is the spatial judgement task, wher...

The cognitive bias approach provides information on the valence of affective states in non-human animals. In our study, we used a serotonin depletion model using para-Chlorophenylalanine (pCPA) to decrease brain serotonin levels in pigs in order to validate our cognitive bias paradigm and provide insight into its neural underpinnings. All experimen...

Abnormal behaviour is a potential indicator of pain, suffering and injury in captive animals. Especially stereotypies, i.e. repetitive invariant behavioural patterns without obvious function or goal, can be observed as a consequence of inadequate housing conditions. Hence, they are often considered indicators of impaired welfare. In context of the...

In the study of animal emotions, emotional valence has been found to be difficult to measure. Many studies of farm animals' emotions have therefore focussed on the identification of indicators of strong, mainly negative, emotions. However, subtle variations in emotional valence, such as those caused by rather moderate differences in husbandry condi...

Zusammenfassung Wiederholtes Testen in einem cognitive bias Paradigma war beim Hausschwein bisher nicht möglich. In dieser Studie wurde ein räumliches Versuchsdesign genutzt, um 15 Tiere in einer Go/NoGo-discrimination-task darauf zu trainieren, eine positiv assoziierte Position einer Zielbox (Belohnung) von einer negativ assoziierten Position (mil...

Cognitive and emotional coping with the environment in the domestic pig a challenge for animal husbandry and welfare The present paper reviews current behavioural and physiological aspects of cognition and emotion in animals and presents the effects of a cognitive enrichment on welfare in domestic pigs. Cognitive behaviour and emotional experiences...

Modern concepts of Animal Welfare emphasize the relevance of emotions and moods for the wellbeing of an animal. However, the valence (positive/negative) of affective states is difficult to measure. Studies on consequences of affect on cognitive processing (cognitive bias) seem to provide promising approaches. This paper focuses on judgement biases,...

In domestic pigs, vocalisation can be an indicator of distress and negative emotional states. It might play a role in the transfer of emotion between individuals ('emotional contagion' or 'empathy'), which could result in impaired animal welfare on a group level based on the distress in an individual member of the group. The aim of this study was t...

The interpretation of calls of animals can provide information on their emotional state and, as a consequence, on well-being in a non-invasive manner. Sound analysis can also be a tool for supervising the conditions of animal housing. For example, incidences of insufficient feed, water, temperature or the occurrence of diseases can be detected. Sta...

Vocalisation can indicate an animal's emotional and/or physiological state. Thus, the detailed analysis of acoustic signals might provide a useful non-invasive method of assessing the welfare status of animals. Focussing on vocal expressions of distress, the present study examined vocal responses of 10-week-old domestic pigs during a classical cond...

In a pilot study we have injected the amygdala of five female pigs (age 8 weeks) with acetylcholine (ACh, 5.5muM/20mul) and recorded short latency utterances. The evoked vocalizations displayed the characteristics of natural screams in sonagram appearance and hearing impression. Quantitative analyses, too, revealed the similarity of the ACh-evoked...