ABSTRACT
Mendl et al. address a better understanding of animal emotions. They challenge a “discrete emotions” approach as piecemeal and incomplete. They also assess the value of “dimensional” approaches in which emotional states are seen as continuums of experience in two-or three-dimensional space, with various values of positivity and negativity. The authors propose a combination to provide a conceptual framework to study animal emotions that offers a structure to integrate disparate discrete emotions, gives a perspective on how “free-floating” mood states arise, and provides new hypothesis-driven measures of animal emotion.
