ArticleFrontiers in behavioral neuroscience2018
Attention Bias Test Differentiates Anxiety and Depression in Sheep.
Article in Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Behaviour of ewes and lambs in response to human emotional odours.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Recognising depression in non-human primates: a narrative review of reported signs of depression.PeerJ · 2025Review
- Do sheep (Ovis aries) discriminate human emotional odors?Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Pharmacological validation of an attention bias test for conventional broiler chickens.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- Sex impacts pain behaviour but not emotional reactivity of lambs following ring tail docking.PeerJ · 2023Article
- Positive Aspects of Welfare in Sheep: Current Debates and Future Opportunities.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Assess the Welfare Impacts of a New Virtual Fencing Technology.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2021Article
- Impact of canine epilepsy on judgement and attention biases.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Attention Bias Test Measures Negative But Not Positive Affect in Sheep: A Replication Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Characteristic patterns of EEG oscillations in sheep (Ovis aries) induced by ketamine may explain the psychotropic effects seen in humans.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The Influence of Predictability and Controllability on Stress Responses to the Aversive Component of a Virtual Fence.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2020Article
- The 24-Form Tai Chi Improves Anxiety and Depression and Upregulates miR-17-92 in Coronary Heart Disease Patients After Percutaneous Coronary Intervention.Frontiers in physiology · 2020Article
- Effects of early and later life environmental enrichment and personality on attention bias in pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus).Animal cognition · 2019Article
- Pharmacologically-induced stress has minimal impact on judgement and attention biases in sheep.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Mood induction alters attention toward negative-positive stimulus pairs in sheep.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- An Appraisal of Methods for Measuring Welfare of Grazing Ruminants.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2019Review
- Article
- Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Negative affective states such as anxiety and depression pose a risk to animal welfare, however, practical tests for assessing these states in animals are limited. In humans, anxious individuals are shown to pay more attention toward threatening information than non-anxious individuals, known as an attention bias. Previously, an attention bias test was developed and validated as a measure of anxious states in sheep, where more anxious sheep showed increased attention toward a threat (dog) and were more vigilant than Control animals. Studies in humans suggest that attention biases also occur in depressed individuals, with observations of attention biases toward threats, as well as biases away from positive stimuli. Given these findings, we hypothesized that an attention bias test for sheep could also be used to assess states of depression. We predicted that Merino ewes in pharmacologically induced Depressed (para-chlorophenylalanine) and Anxious (m-chlorophenylpiperazine) states would show greater attention toward a threat than Control animals (saline), but that the Depressed sheep would show relatively less interest in a positive stimulus (photograph of a conspecific). During testing, Depressed sheep paid more attention toward the threat and less toward the photograph than Control animals as predicted (Analyses of Variance,
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.