Reactive or Proactive? What’s Agency Got to Do With It? In my last post, we talked about the use of the word “reactivity” to describe how easily an emotional response is triggered in an individual animal. In this article, I am going to talk about two perspectives on reactive and proactive responding. The most widespread… Continue reading Reactive or Proactive? What’s Agency Got to Do With It?
What Does Reactivity Really Mean? That’s a good question! Depending on where you look, there are many different definitions of the term. If we look at the research on emotion, one definition of reactivity comes from the concept of affective style, originally developed by Richard Davidson. Affective style refers to individual differences in the three… Continue reading What Does Reactivity Really Mean?
Working with animals that suffer from high levels of anxiety and fear is heartbreaking. They are suffering in a very real way and, as much as we want to help them, dramatic progress is often difficult. There are many possible causes of intense fear and anxiety, but in this blog post I’m going to focus… Continue reading Trauma, Chronic Stress, and the Brain
This month we’re going to take a look at fear learning. Fear and anxiety underly many of the behavior issues in dogs. Understanding the subtleties of how fear works can help us prevent and address it more effectively. First, it’s important to understand how fear develops in the first place. Certain things are innately frightening… Continue reading The Development of Fear
Currently, the primary way of addressing fear in dogs is through the use of desensitization and counter conditioning. For this month’s blog post, I am going to spend some time digging into the details of what counter conditioning is, how it functions, and what its limitations are. Counter conditioning refers to the process of… Continue reading Making the most of counter conditioning
