Cure for tantrums? Longitudinal associations between parental digital emotion regulation and children's self-regulatory skills.

Introduction: Parents often use digital devices to regulate their children's negative emotions, e.g., to stop tantrums.

Comparing the mental effects of interacting with farm animals and walking in a botanical garden.

Over the past two decades, farm animal-assisted therapies have become popular. However, the effects of farm animals on healthy people's mental states have not yet been investigated. In Study 1, we aimed to explore whether positive effects of human-animal interaction (HAI) can be detected in healthy farm volunteers even after short-term (2-3 hours) work with goats and goatlings on a goat farm.

Concepts for drone based pipeline leak detection.

The quickly developing drone technology can be used efficiently in the field of pipeline leak detection. The aim of this article is to provide drone mission concepts for detecting releases from pipelines. It provides an overview of the current applications of natural gas pipeline surveys, it considers environmental conditions by plume modelling, it discusses suitable commercially available sensors, and develops concepts for routine monitoring of pipelines and short term missions for localising and identifying a known leakage.

Spontaneous action matching in dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups.

We investigated the spontaneous tendency of dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups to match their behaviour to actions demonstrated by a human, in the absence of food reward. Based on dogs' inherent sociality and domestication history, we predicted that the tendency to match human actions is more pronounced in this species than in the other two. To test this, we exposed N = 42 dog puppies, N = 39 kittens and N = 8 wolf pups to ostensive human demonstrations of an object-related action.

Cognitive Group Testing Promotes Affiliative Behaviors in Dolphins.

Ex-situ research in aquariums and zoological settings not only support scientific advancement, they also provide opportunities for education, facilitating both mental and physical stimulation, consequently improving welfare. This study aimed to investigate the impact of cognitive testing on the well-being of a group of male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins. The occurrence of affiliative, aggressive and potentially stereotypical behaviors was assessed based on seven monitored behavior types and compared between "Session days" and "Non-session days.

Transcriptomics of Parental Care in the Hypothalamic-Septal Region of Female Zebra Finch Brain.

(1) Background: The objective of this study was to uncover genomic causes of parental care. Since birds do not lactate and, therefore, do not show the gene expressional changes required for lactation, we investigate gene expression associated with parenting in caring and non-caring females in an avian species, the small passerine bird zebra finch (). Here, we compare expression patterns in the hypothalamic-septal region since, previously, we showed that this area is activated in parenting females.

An exploratory analysis of head-tilting in dogs.

Little is known about head-tilts in dogs. Based on previous investigations on the head turning and the lateralised brain pattern of human speech processing in dogs, we hypothesised that head-tilts may be related to increased attention and could be explained by lateralised mental functions. We observed 40 dogs during object-label knowledge tests and analysed head-tilts occurring while listening to humans requesting verbally to fetch a familiar toy.

Group size, partner choice and collaborative actions in male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus).

Due to the diversity of the phenomenon, dolphin cooperation has attracted considerable research interest in both wild populations and those under human care. Dolphins cooperate in various contexts, including group hunting, alloparental care, social learning, social play and alliance formation for securing mates. This investigation focused on the effect of group size and partner choice in a cooperative task using systematic group testing.

Cognitive enrichment device provides evidence for intersexual differences in collaborative actions in Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus).

Social living, long lifespan and advanced cognitive skills provided favourable conditions for the development of pro-social behaviours and cooperative activities in cetacean. Dolphins have been observed to collaborate for various purposes, finding food, finding mates or raising and teaching younger individuals. This study investigated the potential impact of demographic factors (sex and age), social factors (relatedness and group size), and individual experience in a cooperative problem solving task.

Did we find a copycat? Do as I Do in a domestic cat (Felis catus).

This study shows evidence of a domestic cat (Felis catus) being able to successfully learn to reproduce human-demonstrated actions based on the Do as I Do paradigm. The subject was trained to reproduce a small set of familiar actions on command "Do it!" before the study began. To test feature-contingent behavioural similarity and control for stimulus enhancement, our test consisted of a modified version of the two-action procedure, combined with the Do as I Do paradigm.

Comparing the tractability of young hand-raised wolves (Canis lupus) and dogs (Canis familiaris).

Dogs live in 45% of households, integrated into various human groups in various societies. This is certainly not true for wolves. We suggest that dogs' increased tractability (meant as individual dogs being easier to control, handle and direct by humans, in contrast to trainability defined as performance increase due to training) makes a crucial contribution to this fundamental difference.

Mental representation and episodic-like memory of own actions in dogs.

We investigated whether dogs remember their spontaneous past actions relying on episodic-like memory. Dogs were trained to repeat a small set of actions upon request. Then we tested them on their ability to repeat other actions produced by themselves, including actions performed spontaneously in everyday situations.

Brain Distribution and Sexually Dimorphic Expression of Amylin in Different Reproductive Stages of the Zebra Finch () Suggest Roles of the Neuropeptide in Song Learning and Social Behaviour.

The expression of the recently identified neuropeptide, amylin, is restricted in rodents to the postpartum preoptic area and may play a role in the control of parental behaviours and food intake. These processes are substantially different between bird and rodent parents as birds do not lactate but often show biparental care of the offspring. To establish the presence and role of amylin in the bird brain, in the present study, we investigated the distribution of amylin in brains of adult male and female zebra finches in three different reproductive stages (i.

Neuronal activation in zebra finch parents associated with reintroduction of nestlings.

Recent studies of the brain mechanisms of parental behaviors have mainly focused on rodents. Using other vertebrate taxa, such as birds, can contribute to a more comprehensive, evolutionary view. In the present study, we investigated a passerine songbird, the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), with a biparental caring system.

Social behavior in dog puppies: Breed differences and the effect of rearing conditions.

Introduction: Most of the studies investigating the effect of early rearing environment in dogs used laboratory dogs and reported that early experiences markedly affect the puppies' behavior. However, the subjects of these experiments cannot be considered as representatives of family dogs.

Methods: In this study, we investigated whether different raising conditions shape social behavior toward humans in 8-week-old family dog puppies of two breeds, Labrador and Czechoslovakian wolf dog.

Conserved transcriptomic profiles underpin monogamy across vertebrates.

Social monogamy, typically characterized by the formation of a pair bond, increased territorial defense, and often biparental care, has independently evolved multiple times in animals. Despite the independent evolutionary origins of monogamous mating systems, several homologous brain regions and neuropeptides and their receptors have been shown to play a conserved role in regulating social affiliation and parental care, but little is known about the neuromolecular mechanisms underlying monogamy on a genomic scale. Here, we compare neural transcriptomes of reproductive males in monogamous and nonmonogamous species pairs of mice, voles, parid songbirds, dendrobatid frogs, and species of cichlid fishes.

Social learning of goal-directed actions in dogs (Canis familiaris): Imitation or emulation?

A goal-directed action is composed of two main elements on which the observer may focus its attention: the movement performed (i.e., the action) and the outcome (i.

The behaviour of overweight dogs shows similarity with personality traits of overweight humans.

Excessive food intake and the resulting excess weight gain is a growing problem in human and canine populations. Dogs, due to their shared living environment with humans, may provide a beneficial model to study the causes and consequences of obesity. Here, we make use of two well-established research paradigms (two-way choice paradigm and cognitive bias test), previously applied with dogs, to investigate the role of obesity and obesity-prone breeds for food responsiveness.

Social learning from conspecifics and humans in dog puppies.

Social learning is especially advantageous for young individuals because it reduces the risks of trial-and-error learning, while providing an efficient way of acquiring information. Whereas adult dogs are known to excel in social learning skills, the ontogeny of this process has been mainly overlooked. The focus of our study was to investigate whether the capacity of social learning is already developed in dogs at an early age.

Differences in pre-sleep activity and sleep location are associated with variability in daytime/nighttime sleep electrophysiology in the domestic dog.

The domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is a promising animal model. Yet, the canine neuroscience literature is predominantly comprised of studies wherein (semi-)invasive methods and intensive training are used to study awake dog behavior. Given prior findings with humans and/or dogs, our goal was to assess, in 16 family dogs (1.

Perception of animacy in dogs and humans.

Humans have a tendency to perceive inanimate objects as animate based on simple motion cues. Although animacy is considered as a complex cognitive property, this recognition seems to be spontaneous. Researchers have found that young human infants discriminate between dependent and independent movement patterns.

Diurnal and Reproductive Stage-Dependent Variation of Parental Behaviour in Captive Zebra Finches.

Parental care plays a key role in ontogeny, life-history trade-offs, sexual selection and intra-familial conflict. Studies focusing on understanding causes and consequences of variation in parental effort need to quantify parental behaviour accurately. The applied methods are, however, diverse even for a given species and type of parental effort, and rarely validated for accuracy.

Recall of Others' Actions after Incidental Encoding Reveals Episodic-like Memory in Dogs.

The existence of episodic memory in non-human animals is a debated topic that has been investigated using different methodologies that reflect diverse theoretical approaches to its definition. A fundamental feature of episodic memory is recalling after incidental encoding, which can be assessed if the recall test is unexpected [1]. We used a modified version of the "Do as I Do" method [2], relying on dogs' ability to imitate human actions, to test whether dogs can rely on episodic memory when recalling others' actions from the past.

Differential effects of oxytocin on social sensitivity in two distinct breeds of dogs (Canis familiaris).

Dogs have been proven to show several human-analogue social behaviors, and recent research raises the possibility that the oxytocin system is related to these. However, despite dogs' general tendency to excel in the domain of social cognition, there is increasing evidence that dogs' ability to utilize human signals may vary with breed. Moreover, breeds may show differences not only in their 'inborn' communicative abilities, but also in their learning skills related to these.