I've met ornamental marine fish that seemed more interactive with humans than you might expect, and not just the run of the mill coming up to the glass expecting food. The strangest one was a black durgon triggerfish that would come up to the top to get held. Not making this up. With enough solitary confinement, any stimulation might look desirable.
I think that captive animals of many sorts get a lot of behavioral/ "mental" issues that are artifacts of captivity generally and inadequate captive conditions specifically. There's not a lot of good anecdotal data about housing herps in radically different conditions, contrary to what might be thought. Very few keepers have kept the same species or same specimens in substantially different housing situations for enough time to yield accurate observations, so what we tend to get are cherry picked examples that are a good illustration of confirmation bias more than anything. I've done some comparisons with dart frogs -- same group of animals in a small enclosure for a couple years, then in a larger one for a couple years; also, splitting a sibling group into two somewhat different housing setups for a few years; also, UVB vs no UVB -- and got some useful observations, but they could not be generalized over all of herpdom, nor even over all species of dart frogs. (I've experienced enough counterexamples to 'all snakes do better in a larger enclosure' to come to understand that this isn't 100% accurate, or at least needs to be very heavily qualified and hedged in order to be true, for example.)
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