Resources

Use these links to explore some of the guidelines, issues and debates relating to the use of animals in contemporary psychological research.

In 2020 the British Psychological Society produced these guidelines for members engaged in psychological activities involving living animals.

This important report by Shelly Volsche, Holly Root-Gutteridge, Anna T Korzeniowska and Alexandra Horowitz calls for a rethink of how we should re-examine past behavioural science research involving animals, propose a new tool for citing past and future research, and a method of transparent reporting for future behaviour research that highlights animal welfare amongst other issues.

In the United States, the Belmont Report established key ethical principles to which human research should adhere, following criticism of abuse of human participants in some research. This article explores how the ethical principles outlined in the Belmont Report could be applied consistently to animals.

There are various charities & organisations dedicated to ending experiments on animals and finding alternatives. In the UK these include:

The exhibition can be used to inform a range of classroom activities for students of all ages studying psychology. The main topic the exhibition relates to is the ethics of animal research, and the treatment and welfare of the animals involved, but it is also relevant to many areas of psychology, including experimental psychology, the psychology of human-animal relations, and conceptual and historical issues in psychology. This document suggests a series of linked activities aimed at undergraduate psychology students. Feel free to use and adapt any way you like!

The most important single source for the exhibition was the book Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science by the historian Daniel Todes. If you want to know more about the life and times of Pavlov, this should be your guide. 

The following links are for academic articles that provide deeper critical engagement with different aspects of Pavlov’s work. All informed the research behind the exhibition.

Psychologist and creator of this exhibition Matt Adams revisits Pavlov’s labs from a dog’s perspective for The Psychologist magazine.

A more detailed academic analysis of the role of Pabvlov’s dogs in the experiments and how they are represented today in educational texts.

This article documents and describes the lives and work of women who worked in Pavlov’s labs.

An interesting parallel case, this article explores the lived experiences of the dogs used to develop the Soviet manned space flight programme in the context of the history of Soviet science.