Sorry for bumping up this 3 month old topic, but as a neuroscientist I find the topic of 'awareness/emotion' in all animals interesting, and as a snake keeper especially in snakes. The whole problem with thinking your snake is happy/sad or any other human emotion is that we project our own view of an experience on the snake. When your snake, or any other animal for that matter, is happily dozing away after eating a meal, we would call it content with it's position, because that is what we would be when placed in that exact position.
We don't know what, or even if, an animal feels the same way. Only for mammals we have an indication that something is going on at the emotional level, as extensive research has been done on brain activity during 'emotional' tasks or settings like relapse to an addicted state in rats or social interaction by rats that have been made 'depressed'. There are even what you could call 'clinical symptoms' for these conditions, which don't diverge that far from what we see in addicted or depressed humans.
To my knowledge there have not been any studies regarding emotional awareness or pathological emotional states in reptiles, however, my knowledge on this is still limited (thanks falconeer999 for the website...will be spending quite some time there
). What I do know is that many reptiles can learn and that snakes, widely regarded as the simplest of reptiles, can be trained to recognize spatial cues and efficiently navigate 3D space. This research group trained cornsnakes on in a round chamber with 8 evenly spaced holes in the floor around the rim. 7 of these holes were cover from underneath so the snake could not climb in, but the cover was only visible when the snake reached the hole, and a white card was placed on one side of the chamber. similar setups have also been widely used with spatial recognition training in mice and rats this is generally called the 'Barnes maze'. After training (placing the snake in the maze in the same orientation each time, leaving the same hole as an escape hole) the snakes became more efficient and goal-directed towards the escape hole, showing they can recognize environmental ques to efficiently navigate a familiar environment.
Although this doesn't answer anything about the question 'do reptiles have emotions or feelings' it shows that they have a complex brain which can learn and integrate somatosensory and behavioural patterns. Who knows what else we can learn about reptiles and cognition. I'll keep digging, this is pretty interesting stuff and I didn't know there was this much research about it out there, and let you guys know if I find something worthwhile to maybe answer this ever ongoing discussion
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