Research overview: qualitative behaviour assessment and affective state in felids

Qualitative Behaviour Assessment asks trained observers to score the expressive demeanour of an animal, capturing emotional qualities such as relaxed, tense, content or frustrated that quantitative ethograms may miss. This overview surveys the method's development, its reliability and validity, and its emerging application to captive cats as a way to assess affective state and positive welfare. It discusses how QBA complements behavioural counts and physiology, the training and statistical approaches used to ensure inter-observer agreement, and the promise and limits of integrating subjective expert judgement into welfare science. For felids, whose subtle body language conveys much about their emotional state, QBA offers a practical tool for whole-animal welfare evaluation.