Human Psychology of Animal Sentience

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to invite you to contribute to a Special Issue in the journal Animals, focusing on human perception of animal sentience.

Human attitudes and behaviors towards different kinds of non-human animals are affected by a variety of evolutionary, biological, historical, sociological, cultural, psychological, economical, and legal, factors. One factor that seems to play a key role in shaping human attitudes towards non-human animals is the degree to which an animal is believed to be sentient, experience emotions, or possess advanced cognitive abilities.

This Special Issue invites empirical and review papers from various disciplines that focus on the factors that cause, mediate or moderate human perception of animal sentience, and/or the effect that perception of animal sentience has on human attitudes and behaviors towards (different kinds of) animals. Advancing the scientific understanding of these factors may be of particular importance to the promotion of animal welfare and legal rights, as well as for the improvement of the human–animal relationship.

Dr. Uri Lifshin
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• animal rights
• animal sentience
• animal welfare
• attitudes towards animals
• human–animal relations