Signs of generalized anxiety and compulsive disorders in chimpanzees

Fear and anxiety have been studied extensively in humans and other animals. However, far less attention has been focused on the clinical and ethical implications of nonhuman animals’ susceptibility to psychological disorders. Behavioral signs of psychopathology in nonhuman animals, including our closest phylogenetic relatives, are rarely described as clinical syndromes. In this study, we drew on approaches described in child psychiatry, veterinary medicine, and primatology, to identify behavioral clusters in chimpanzees comparable with human anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive–compulsive disorder.