The scientific study of animal affect (emotion) is an area of growing interest. Whilst research on mechanism and causation has predominated, the study of function is less advanced. This is not due to a lack of hypotheses; in both humans and animals, affective states are frequently proposed to play a pivotal role in coordinating adaptive responses and decisions. However, exactly how they might do this (what processes might implement this function) is often left rather vague. Here we propose a framework for integrating animal affect and decision-making that is couched in modern decision theory and employs an operational definition that aligns with dimensional concepts of core affect and renders animal affect empirically tractable. We develop a model of how core affect, including short-term (emotion-like) and longer-term (mood-like) states, influence decision-making via processes that we label affective options, affective predictions, and affective outcomes and which correspond to similar concepts in schema of the links between human emotion and decision-making. Our framework is generalisable across species and generates questions for future research.

中文翻译：

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动物的影响和决策。

动物情感（情绪）的科学研究是一个越来越受关注的领域。虽然对机制和因果关系的研究占主导地位，但对功能的研究却不那么先进。这不是因为缺乏假设。在人类和动物中，情感状态经常被提议在协调适应性反应和决策中发挥关键作用。然而，他们究竟是如何做到这一点的（哪些进程可能实现这个功能）往往是相当模糊的。在这里，我们提出了一个整合动物情感和决策的框架，该框架体现在现代决策理论中，并采用了与核心情感的维度概念一致的操作定义，并使动物情感在经验上易于处理。我们开发了一个核心影响模型，包括短期（类似情绪）和长期（类似情绪）状态，通过我们标记情感选项、情感预测和情感结果的过程来影响决策，这些过程对应于人类情感和决策之间联系模式中的相似概念。我们的框架可以跨物种推广，并为未来的研究提出问题。