What the Rat Brain Tells Us About Yours
A little more than a decade ago, Mike Mendl developed a new test for gauging a laboratory rat’s level of happiness. Mendl, an animal welfare researcher in the veterinary school at the University of Bristol in England, was looking for an objective way to tell whether animals in captivity were suffering. Specifically, he wanted to be able to measure whether, and how much, disruptions in lab rats’ routines—being placed in an unfamiliar cage, say, or experiencing a change in the light/dark cycle of the room in which they were housed—were bumming them out.
He and his colleagues explicitly drew on an extensive literature in psychology that describes how people with mood disorders such as depression process information and make decisions: They tend to focus on and recall more negative events and to judge ambiguous things in a more negative way. You might say that they tend to see the proverbial glass as half-empty rather than half-full. “We thought that it’s easier to measure cognitive things than emotional ones, so we devised a test that would give us some indication of how animals responded under ambiguity,” Mendl says. “Then, we could use that as a proxy measure of the emotional state they were in.”
First, they trained rats to associate one tone with something positive (food, of course) and a different tone with something negative (hearing an unpleasant noise). They also trained them to press a lever upon hearing the good tone. Then, for the test, they’d play an intermediate tone and watch how the animals responded. Rats have great hearing, and the ones whose cage life wasn’t disturbed were pretty good judges of where the new tone fell between the other two sounds. If it was closer to the positive tone they’d hit the lever, and if it was closer to the negative one they’d lay off. But the ones
