Do animals have reflective minds?

According to one of the leading scholars in the field, there is an emerging consensus among scientists that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition -- that is, our ability to reflect on our own mental processes and guide and optimize them.  Scientists concur that when it comes to this Old World macaque: monkey see, monkey do, monkey think about what monkey do, monkey maybe do something else [Credit: University at Buffalo] In two new contributions to this influential field of comparative psychology, David Smith, PhD, of the University at Buffalo and his fellow researchers report on continuing advances in this domain.  Smith is a professor in the Department of Psychology at UB, and a member of the...

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Denying mental qualities to animals in order to eat them

New research by Dr Brock Bastian from UQ's School of Psychology highlights the psychological processes that people engage in to reduce their discomfort over eating meat.  This paper will be published in an upcoming edition of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, where Dr Bastian and his co-authors show that people deny mental qualities to animals they eat.  "Many people like eating meat, but most are reluctant to harm things that have minds. Our studies show that this motivates people to deny minds to animals," Dr Bastian said.  The research demonstrates when people are confronted with the harm that their meat-eating brings to food animals they view those animals as possessing fewer mental capacities compared...

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Adolescent sex linked to adult body, mood troubles... in hampsters

A new study suggests that sex during adolescence can have lasting negative effects on the body and mood well into adulthood, most likely because the activity occurs when the nervous system is still developing.  While the research used laboratory animals, the findings provide information that may be applicable to understanding human sexual development.  Researchers paired adult female hamsters with male hamsters when the males were 40 days old, the equivalent of a human's mid-adolescence. They found that these male animals with an early-life sexual experience later showed more signs of depressive-like behaviors as well as lower body mass, smaller reproductive tissues and changes to cells in the brain than did hamsters that were...

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Chromosomal “Breakpoints” Linked to Canine Cancer

North Carolina State University researchers have uncovered evidence that evolutionary “breakpoints” on canine chromosomes are also associated with canine cancer. Mapping these “fragile” regions in dogs may also have implications for the discovery and treatment of human cancers.  When new species evolve, they leave genetic evidence behind in the form of “breakpoint regions.” These regions are sites on the genome where chromosomes broke during speciation (when new species of dogs developed). Dr. Matthew Breen, professor of genomics at NC State, and graduate student Shannon Becker looked at the breakpoint regions that occurred when the canid (dog) species differentiated during evolution. They compared the genomes of several wild canine...

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