The four Cs of psychological wellbeing: Lessons from three decades of computer-based environmental enrichment (2015)

Washburn, D.

Abstract

Three decades ago, the Animal Welfare Act was amended to require researchers to provide environments that promoted the psychological, as well as the physical, wellbeing of nonhuman primates maintained for research purposes. We developed a computer-task paradigm with the goal of promoting and assessing the psychological wellbeing of rhesus monkeys. Some lessons learned in the three decades of using this enrichment strategy are discussed in this review. These findings underscore the importance of comfort, companionship, challenge and control in the psychological wellbeing of nonhuman primates, and the utility of game-like computerized tasks for addressing these dimensions of psychological fitness.