In this two-part study, we conducted both cross-sectional and longitudinal investigations on the relative weights of experiential, cognitive, and sociopsychological factors in adult L2 speech learning. In the cross-sectional phase (Study 1), speech was elicited from 73 Japanese speakers of English via a picture description task, and rated for accentedness and comprehensibility. These scores were linked to scores on a range of tests designed to measure aptitude, motivation, and anxiety. The results showed that comprehensibility was exclusively linked to experiential variables (e.g., the amount of L2 use outside classrooms), while accentedness was linked to phonemic coding ability and anxiety. In the longitudinal phase (Study 2), we tracked the same participants' L2 comprehensibility and accentedness development when they received four weeks of explicit pronunciation instruction. According to the results of pre- and post-tests, participants significantly improved the comprehensibility and accentedness of their speech regardless of cognitive and sociopsychological differences.

In hedonic theories of motivation, ‘motivational affective states’ (MASs) are typically seen as adaptations which motivate certain types of behaviour, especially in situations where a flexible or learned response is more adaptive than a rigid or reflexive one. MASs can be negative (eg unpleasant feelings of hunger or pain) or positive (eg pleasant feelings associated with eating and playing). Hedonic theories often portray negative and positive MASs as opposite ends of a one-dimensional scale.

We suggest that natural selection has favoured negative and positive affect as separate processes to solve two different types of motivational problems. We propose that negative MASs (eg thirst, fear) evolved in response to ‘need situations’ where the fitness benefit of an action has increased, often because the action is needed to cope with a threat to survival or reproductive success. We propose that these negative MASs develop in response to a change in the body (eg dehydration) or the environment (eg the approach of a predator) which creates the need for action, and that negative MASs can become intense and prolonged if the threat to fitness is high and persistent. We propose that positive MASs evolved in ‘opportunity situations ‘ where an action (eg playing, exploring) has become advantageous because the fitness cost of performing it has declined. We propose that these positive MASs occur during, or as a result of, the performance of types of behaviour which are beneficial for fitness at a variety of times, not only when they are required to meet immediate needs; and that the pleasure inherent in the behaviour motivates the animal to perform it when the cost of so doing is sufficiently low. Some behaviour (eg eating) can be motivated by both positive and negative affect. Other behaviour, such as playing or fleeing from a predator, may be motivated largely by positive or negative affect alone. Our hypothesis needs to be tested, but we suggest that it corresponds well to common human experience.

The hypothesis provides a basis for predicting whether an aspect of animal management is likely to cause strong and prolonged negative affect (‘suffering’), or to prevent animals from experiencing certain types of pleasure. This distinction is important for bringing animal welfare assessment into line with ethical concerns.

The purpose of this study was to assess whether running an alleyway can be used to measure the motivation of lizards. Six, eyed skinks, Chalcides ocellatus, were trained to run an alleyway to reach sand in which to hide. Each skink was deprived of sand for 0, 1, 5 or 15 minutes on four occasions and the times to run the alleyway and the latencies to move were recorded. When the sand was 38cm from the start, the three deprivation periods resulted in decreased latencies and increased speed (P < 0.01), but there was no difference between the speeds or latencies for any of the deprivation periods. In a second experiment, the sand was moved to 94cm from the start. Latencies to move did decrease (p < 0.05) as in the first experiment, but speed did not increase. Within certain constraints, this methodology appears to be a good way of assessing motivation of reptiles.

The use of demand functions to identify the behaviours most important to animals has been advocated widely. The principle is to place increasing cost on the opportunity to perform several behaviours and subsequently to rank these behaviours according to the change in their performance as a function of cost; this change is described by the elasticity of the demand function. However, the method has been criticised for placing the animal in too artificial a setting. Firstly, the animal works repeatedly for short periods of access to a resource, which may interrupt bouts of behaviour; secondly, animals are tested in isolation, which may affect their motivation to perform the target behaviour; and, finally, assumptions regarding the effect of prior deprivation and reward duration on elasticity of demand need to be tested. This criticism, however, is important only if these factors do affect the elasticity of the resulting demand function. This paper reviews experiments that have developed methods to assess the importance of various behaviours to farm animals and that have tested the effect of social context, length of deprivation of a resource and reward duration. It is concluded that the elasticity of demand function may be used to assess the relative importance of various behaviours, but that it is important to make sure that the experimental set-up yields valid estimates of the elasticity of demand.

In the test described here, sheep are exposed to a situation of conflict between the motivation to approach other sheep and the motivation to avoid a human handler. The distance that the test sheep keep from the handler is a reflection of the relative aversiveness of this handler to the sheep. The test itself requires only a minimum amount of handling and gives the test animals the opportunity to choose their distance from the aversive stimulus, thereby reducing stress during the test itself. The two aversive stimuli chosen for comparison were a human handler facing toward the test arena (more aversive) or the same handler turning his back to the arena (less aversive). Ten Scottish Blackface sheep were tested individually a total of ten times, five times with each of the two stimuli in alternate tests. During the first two tests, nine of the sheep stayed further away when the human was facing toward the arena, compared to when he was facing away; this shows that the test is able to discriminate differences in aversiveness between two stimuli as perceived by individual sheep. This difference was not apparent in the following eight tests, probably because of the fact that the stimuli were not reinforced during the tests. Because the test is concerned with sheep's reaction to a stimulus (eg handler), the procedure associated with the stimulus itself (eg shearing, castration) does not have to be repeated in the test, which means that this method is ideal for studying procedures which cause distress to the animals or which are difficult to repeat.

Animals should be given the opportunity to perform behaviours that they are motivated to show if we are to maximise their welfare. Research studies into motivation and appropriate methods of studying it are therefore important. Different factors may need to be taken into consideration depending on the form of the behaviour being studied. Certain commodities, such as a perch for night-time roosting, have a value only if the animal is given full access to them until it has completed the behaviour. For other commodities, such as food and water, the amount can be varied along a continuous scale without affecting the animals’ demand for that resource. The commonly used operant techniques generating demand curves are based on the assumption that demand is not affected by the size of the reward (ie how much of the commodity the animal gains access to). As a consequence, these techniques are appropriate only for assessing motivation for resources of which the size can be varied. Resources of the ‘all-or-none’ type, on the other hand, require a different approach. We discuss different adaptations of the push-door technique as a measure of motivation, and we present results that validate a version with fixed, individually adapted levels of resistance. The method was validated using laying hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) tested at different levels of food deprivation and exposed to two series of increasing door resistances. The results show that the level of food-deprivation affects the amount of resistance that is overcome. We conclude that this method could be used to study hens’ motivation for commodities of the ‘all-or-none’ type.

It is generally agreed that farm animal welfare is at a high level when the animals can behave naturally. Most of today's housing systems, however, differ considerably from the natural environment in which the behavioural organisation of the ancestors of our farm animal species evolved. Consequently, normal behaviour may be impaired in several ways. Frequency, duration or sequence of behavioural elements may be affected. Some normal behaviour patterns may not occur at all. The animals may also possibly behave in unnatural ways – in patterns that would never occur in nature. Furthermore, it is usual for farm animals to exhibit behaviour which is normal in form, but which is elicited by artificial structures within their housing system.

In view of these possible changes in normal behaviour, it is necessary to assess, for each farm animal species and each housing system, whether animal welfare is at risk in any way if the behaviour observed differs from the behaviour that would occur in a natural environment. In some cases the question can be answered by taking a theoretical evolutionary approach. In most cases, however, detailed knowledge about the behavioural organisation of the animals is necessary. Such knowledge is built up from animal motivation studies and investigations into the effect of environmental structures on animal behaviour.

A specific problem of on-farm animal welfare assessment is that there is often not enough time to collect sufficient data to make a judgement about the occurrence of normal behaviour. Resource-based assessment methods are appropriate as an alternative, provided that the resource standards used are based on evidence stemming from research into animal behaviour and motivation.

It has been argued that the welfare of gestating sows is higher in groups than singly in stalls, in part because group housing offers them more space and social contact. This study set out to ascertain how important access to a group pen was to dominant sows housed in stalls, using a measure of motivation. Subjects were trained to perform a panel-pressing task, then housed in a stall and permitted each day to work for a day's access to a fully slatted group pen containing two familiar, subordinate sows at a stocking density of 2.7m2 per pig. Social ranking was determined by observations at mixing and from feed competition tests. The fixed-ratio schedule was increased daily and the highest schedule reached (the reservation price) was used as a measure of motivational strength. To interpret this measure, it was compared with the highest schedule that subjects reached when working for access to the last 1/16th of their estimated ad libitum daily food intake after having consumed the first 15/16ths free. Sixteen subjects were tested, eight working for access to the group pen first and eight for access to the food first. Seven subjects yielded useable data: four reached a higher schedule working for food and three reached a higher schedule working for the group pen. Overall, subjects attached no more importance to a day's access to the group pen than to the last 1/16th of their estimated ad libitum food intake. It is likely that the subjects were close to satiation when working for food because consumption frequently fell substantially short of the ‘ad libitum‘ allowance. These results suggest that dominant, stall-housed sows are only weakly motivated to gain access to a fully slatted group pen, although motivation might be higher when deprived of access to the group pen for longer than one day, if tested at a different time of day or if the quality of the group space was improved; these three possibilities still need to be tested.

It is commonly assumed that animals suffer if they cannot perform behaviours seen in wild conspecifics. Although comparisons with the behaviour of wild conspecifics are a popular method of assessing the welfare of captive animals, their validity has not been fully assessed. Homeostatic models of motivation suggest that many behaviours are stimulus driven rather than internally generated. Thus, it is possible that the non-performance of some wild-type behaviours does not necessarily compromise animal welfare, unless welfare is defined as being compromised by such non-performance. The flexibility of wild animal behaviour and the fact that animals free to perform the complete range of wild behaviours can suffer, must also put into the question the validity of such comparisons. Technical criticisms also arise when one considers the difficulty of constructing accurate and unbiased time budgets for wild animals. It is possible that the expressions of wild-type behaviours correlate with enhanced welfare, rather than cause enhanced welfare. Thus, if the consequences of behaviour are more important than the expression of behaviour itself, environmental enrichment does not necessarily need to rely upon the performance of wild-type behaviours for the improvement of animal welfare. Therefore, although behavioural comparisons with wild animals can be considered as potentially useful indicators of behavioural differences, they cannot always be relied upon to give an objective assessment of animal welfare. To make an assessment of welfare, behavioural comparisons with wild animals should be used in conjunction with other techniques to demonstrate that the consequences of non-performance of wild behaviours results in impoverished welfare.

The inflammatory response evokes changes in behaviour including increased thermoregulatory activities and sleep, reduced social exploration and appetite, and altered food preferences. This sickness response also includes feelings of lethargy, depression, and pain, collectively referred to as ‘malaise’. Recent experiments involving laboratory rodents reveal information about proximate mechanisms of sickness behaviour, but scant information exists about how sickness behaviour is expressed by farmed species or within social environments. The behavioural needs of ill individuals differ from those of conspecifics, and failure to accommodate the needs of ill individuals may exacerbate suffering. Policy makers, industry and animal welfare certification programs recommend hospital pens to address the housing and handling needs of ill livestock and to reduce risks of disease transmission. However, a survey of swine farms in Ontario, Canada revealed deficiencies in the use of hospital pens and gaps in knowledge about best management practices for this vulnerable population. There is considerable scope to improve the welfare and husbandry of ill and at risk animals through effective use of hospital pens and supportive therapies.

Free-living hens perch on branches in trees and domestic hens (Gallus gallus domesticus) show signs of unrest if they cannot reach a perch, suggesting that night-time perching is a behaviour that hens are motivated to perform. This motivation was quantified in two experiments using a weighted push-door that hens had to push open in order to gain access to a perch. First, the motivation of individual birds to perch, and second, the effect of a companion bird on perching motivation, were measured. Eight adult laying hens (Lohmann Selected Leghorn) were trained to push through the door at increasing resistances, and the individual capacity of each hen was determined. Hens were then tested once per day, at lights-off in a test pen where pushing through the push-door gave access to the resource. Two consecutive series of increasing resistances were used in the experiment: 25, 50, 75 and 100 per cent of each bird's maximum capacity. In the first experiment, the resources offered were either a perch (treatment) or a ‘sham perch’ that could not be used for perching (control). Hens opened significantly heavier doors in order to gain access to a perch than to gain access to the sham perch. In the second experiment, pushing through the door gave access either to a perch with a companion hen already perching on it (treatment) or to a perch and a companion hen roosting on the floor (control). In this comparison, four of the hens did not push through the door, probably because of aggressive interactions with the companion, and no significant differences between treatments were found. We conclude that hens are motivated to use a perch for night-time roosting and that they should be housed in systems with perches.

Negative symptoms of schizophrenia manifest as reduced motivation and pleasure (MAP) and impaired emotional expressivity (EXP). These can occur as primary phenomena, but have also been suggested to occur secondary to other clinical factors, including antipsychotic-induced sedation. However, this relationship has not been established formally. Here, we examined the effect of antipsychotic-induced sedation (assessed via the proxy of total daily sleep duration) on MAP and EXP in a cohort of 187 clozapine-treated patients with schizophrenia followed for over 2 years on average, using multilevel regression and mediation models. MAP, but not EXP, was adversely influenced by sedation, independently of the severity of psychosis or depression. Moreover, clozapine impaired MAP indirectly by worsening sedation, but after accounting for clozapine-induced sedation, clozapine improved MAP. Our results highlight the importance of addressing sedative side-effects of antipsychotics to improve clinical outcomes.

In a world that offers children abundant activities from which to choose, understanding how to motivate children to engage longer in productive activities is crucial. This paper examines how the offered assortment size affects children’s engagement with their chosen option. In the first study, I show children prefer to choose from a larger set even though they think doing so is more difficult. Then, in Studies 2 and 3, four- to five-year-old children choose from either a small set (two options) or a large set (six or seven options). In study 2, children choose a book to look at and I measure how long they look at it. In Study 3, children choose a game to play with and I measure how long they play. Children spend more time looking at the book and playing with the game they choose from the small versus the large set. By contrast, the size of the choice set does not affect food consumption. Such findings contribute to our understanding of young children’s decision-making and have important implications for determining the optimal assortment size to offer children to increase engagement with desirable activities.

According to regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000), when people make decisions with strategies that sustain their regulatory focus orientation, they “feel right” about what they are doing, and this “feeling-right” experience then transfers to subsequent choices, decisions, and evaluations. The present research was designed to link the concept of regulatory fit to functional accounts of counterfactual thinking. In the present study, participants generated counterfactuals about their anagram performance, after which persistence on a second set of anagrams was measured. Under promotion framing (i.e., find 90% or more of all the possible words) upward counterfactual thinking in general elicited larger increases in persistence than did downward counterfactual thinking in general, but under prevention framing (i.e., avoid failing to find 90% or more of all the possible words) upward evaluation (comparing reality to a better reality) elicited larger increases in persistence than did upward reflection (focusing on a better reality), whereas downward reflection (focusing on a worse reality) elicited larger increases in persistence than did downward evaluation (comparing reality to a worse reality). In all, the present findings suggest that the generation of counterfactuals enhances the likelihood that individuals will engage in courses of action that fit with their regulatory focus orientation.

Our objective was to examine how short-term exposure to wind or rain, or the combination of wind and rain, influences behavioural and physiological responses and the motivation for shelter. Twenty-four, non-lactating, pregnant Holstein-Friesian cows were individually housed and allocated one of four treatments (control, wind, rain, wind and rain) created with fans and sprinklers. Feed intake and behavioural and physiological variables were recorded for 22 h. Motivation to use the shelter was assessed by creating a tradeoff between time spent feeding while exposed to the weather treatments and time spent in the shelter. Feeding times were manipulated by placing frames with three different mesh sizes over the feed; the purpose of the smaller mesh was to increase the time spent feeding. However, shelter use was unchanged by these costs. Cows reduced their feed intake by 62% when exposed to rain and the combination of rain and wind. Cows spent approximately 50% of their time in the shelters in all weather treatments and spent little time lying, especially under wet conditions (5.9, 4.4, 2.8, and 1.1 [± 1.4 h] per 22 h for control, wind, rain, and wind/rain treatments, respectively; mean [± SED]). Rain alone, and in combination with wind, decreased skin temperature by 26%, on average. The short-term response to wet conditions was characterised by a marked decline in lying time, feed intake and skin temperature. Wind alone had little effect on these responses, but magnified the effect of simulated rain on feeding behaviour. These results indicate that protection from both rain and the combination of rain and wind is likely to be important for animal welfare, but future work is needed to understand when and how to provide protection to pastured dairy cattle.

This study has its basis in recent findings by our own and other laboratories and proposes a type of rewarded operant learning that seeks the detection of discriminatory cues as a cognitive enrichment in intensive husbandry systems. This type of cognitive enrichment has the ability to activate the intrinsically-rewarding mesolimbic brain axis when an animal acquires successful strategies to cope with environmental demands. It provides animals with the opportunity to develop positive affects through control of their environment and the anticipation of consummatory reward. If true animal welfare is considered more than simply the absence of stress and harm, provoking better affective conditions may be a suitable way of increasing the well-being of intensively-housed animals. Recent research with elaborated operant learning equipment, under experimental and quasi-commercial conditions, revealed better health, reduced boredom and less maladaptive behaviour as potentially practical advantages. A number of the issues regarding the transfer of this suggested form of cognitive enrichment to large scale, commercial farming are discussed.

Zoo- and anthropomorphism may both be scientific heresies but both may serve as a basis for thought (and real) experiments designed to explore our ability to assess quality of life as perceived by another sentient animal. Sentience, a major contributor to evolutionary fitness in a complex environment, implies ‘feelings that matter’. Strength of motivation is a measure of how much they matter. Since humans and most domestic animals share the property of sentience, it follows that some aspects of feeling may be similar, and where we differ, the differences may be of degree rather than absolute. One of the assumed absolutes that I shall challenge is the concept that non-human animals live only in the present. I explore how domestic animals may experience the feelings of hunger, pain, fear and hope. Hunger is indisputably a primitive sensation. Pain and fear are primitive sensations with emotional overtones. The problem is to discover how they may affect quality of life. Acute pain and fear are positive signals for action to avoid harm. These actions and their consequences (‘how well did I cope?’) will be committed to memory and affect how an animal feels when they recur, or it fears they may recur. Hope (and its antithesis, despair) are considered by many philosophers (who do not own dogs) as emotions restricted to humans since only we can imagine the future. However, by application of zoomorphism we may classify hope with hunger as a primitive feeling of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Either may lead to action directed towards the goal of feeling better or encourage the belief that things will get better (food will arrive). Both are feelings of expectation for the future modulated in the light of past experience. With all these four emotions quality of life may be expressed in terms of how well the animal feels it can cope, both in the present and in the future. When it feels it cannot cope, then it will suffer.

Motivation is a central concept for animal welfare; it has inspired methodological breakthroughs and generated a wealth of crucial empirical work. As the field develops beyond its original mandate to alleviate the suffering of animals in intensive farming systems, the assumptions behind the current models of motivation may warrant closer scrutiny. In this paper, I examine some of the complexities of studying motivation — for example, that what an animal wants can depend on its welfare and that, through genetic selection and housing choices, we can modify what an animal finds to be rewarding versus punishing. The central theme of this paper is, therefore, that we cannot just ask the animals under our care (or even in the wild) what they want and assume that we will receive unadulterated answers, free from human influence. While asking questions about animal motivation with empirical research is invaluable and necessary, our models drive our research questions, methodologies, and results’ interpretation. When the models we employ remain implicit (eg the only motivation questions worth asking are those that could be implemented within the current housing systems), they have ability to stifle progress in understanding animal welfare. Thus, in addition to the empirical work, we also need to expose and evaluate the models that drive the research. Making the models explicit will facilitate our ability to identify their areas of silence, assess their strengths and potential limitations, as well as examine how they conceptualise the relationship between motivation and animal welfare. I end with a discussion of the implications of a few relevant models, both implicit and explicit, noting how such consideration reveals exciting areas for future work, including, for example, research on the motivation to make choices and the motivation to learn.

Severe feather pecking, a potentially stereotypic behaviour in chickens (Gallus gallus), can be reduced by providing enrichment. However, there is little comparative information available on the effectiveness of different types of enrichment. Providing forages to birds is likely to decrease feather-pecking behaviour the most, as it is generally thought that feather pecking stems from re-directed foraging motivation. Yet, other types of enrichment, such as dustbaths and novel objects, have also been shown to reduce feather pecking. In order to develop a practical and effective enrichment, these different possibilities must be examined. Using a Latin Square Design, 14-week old birds were given each of four treatments: i) forages; ii) novel objects; iii) dustbaths; or iv) no enrichment. The amount of feather-pecking behaviour and the number of pecks to the enrichments were recorded. Results showed feather pecking to be highest when no enrichment was present and lowest when the forages were present, with the other two enrichments intermediate. This was despite the fact that the numbers of pecks birds gave to the forages and dustbaths were not significantly different, suggesting that they were similarly used. Thus, we suggest here that forage enrichments are most effective at alleviating feather pecking at least in the short term and attempts should be made to develop poultry housing that allows for natural foraging behaviour. Following this, providing any kind of enrichment will increase bird welfare and is therefore still beneficial.

We present a motivational account of the impact of emotion on decision making, termed the feeling-is-for-doing approach. We first describe the psychology of emotion and argue for a need to be specific when studying emotion's impact on decision making. Next we describe what our approach entails and how it relates emotion, via motivation to behavior. Then we offer two illustrations of our own research that provide support for two important elements in our reasoning. We end with specifying four criteria that we consider to be important when studying how feeling guides our everyday doing.