Mary Bates, PhD

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Pessimistic Rats Take Negative Feedback to Heart

By Janet Stephens [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.Rats can show some of the same cognitive biases people do, including pessimism. A new study demonstrates for the first time a link between negative judgment bias and sensitivity to performance in a rat model.I discuss how you can tell when a rat is pessimistic and how similar pessimistic rats are to depressed humans in my latest post for the British Psychological Society's Research Digest: Pessimistic Rats are Extra Sensitive to Negative Feedback