ReviewFrontiers in veterinary science2025
How facial expressions reveal acute pain in domestic animals with facial pain scales as a diagnostic tool.
Review in Frontiers in veterinary science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Evaluation of the effects of a single bolus of cisatracurium as part of an anesthetic protocol in cats undergoing orthopedic surgery.BMC veterinary research · 2026Article
- Multi-QuadEmoNet: cat and dog emotion classification model from animal vocalization using multi-stage LSTM-GRU paradigm.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Emotional pain in non-human mammals: from neural circuitry and opioid signaling to dysthymia-like states, grief-like behaviors, and physiological dysregulation.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Review
- The impact of bacterial and viral diseases on dromedary camel (Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Review
- Social Housing of Postoperative Animals to Support Animal Welfare.Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science : JAALAS · 2026Review
- Influence of a repeated peripheral electrical stimulation on substance P and cortisol concentrations, and behavior in German Simmental calves - a pilot study.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Preclinical models of stem cell-mediated analgesia and tissue repair: mechanisms, challenges, and future directions.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2026Review
- Automated analysis of emotional expressions in dogs based on geometric morphometrics.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dog facial landmarks detection and its applications for facial analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Regulatory Integrity and Welfare in Horse Sport: A Constructively Critical Perspective.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Initial validation of the LSPain scale: a behaviour-based clinical tool for canine lumbosacral pain.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Article
- Faces of time: a historical overview of rapid innovations in coding animal facial signals.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Review
- The neurobiological basis of emotions and their connection to facial expressions in non-human mammals: insights in nonverbal communication.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The growing interest in managing and recognizing pain in animals has led to the search for more sensitive methods to evaluate it, especially because some species conceal any visible changes associated with pain or are not easily assessed. Research has shown that an animal's facial expression changes when exposed to painful stimuli. Thus, developing several pain scales (grimace scales) in species such as horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, donkeys, rabbits, rats, mice, and cats has helped to improve the study of pain in veterinary medicine. The possibility of using facial expression as an indicator of pain is due to the direct relationship between the activation of different regions of the Central Nervous System such as the somatosensory cortex, prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus, and their connections with the motor cortex to elicit motor responses including the movement of facial muscles. The present review aims to discuss the neurobiological association between acute pain and facial expressions in animals. It will analyze the importance of facial expression characterization and the use of grimace scales in farm, companion, and laboratory species.
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