PSYO 2160 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Neuropharmacology, Personality Psychology, Border Collie
9 May 2018
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Personality in Animals
Individual differences impacting behaviour
o Individual differences vs personality
o Sociality of a species is defined by how much degrees of freedom you have individual
differences
Short Reminder on Personality
o In both neuroscience and psychology, there is a distinction in personality between character
and temperament
o Personality has a tendency to address both
o When biology was focusing on temperament
o Character gets build over time through learning, culture, etc. This is much more fluid
and cannot be easily captured
o Temperamental profile of anxiety, nervousness and aggression is set at birth. This can
even be defined by your neuropharmacology and how much hormone is released in
your brain. It can be biologically measured
Historical Trends
o Personality in animals
o Diamond (1957) in the end of his book talks about personality in cats and dogs
o The bigger, stronger male isn't always the dominant one was discovered by Jane
Goodall
o Every decision is not as much based on the breed but based on predispositions
o Slowly, dog people started realizing that dogs have personality
o Japanese were getting into the culture concept of behaviour
Historical Example: Pavlov
o First discussion of personality in animals came from Pavlov
o In 1927 he had personality identified in dogs
o Pavlov was actually a biologist, he was interested in the digestive system
o He wasn't working with rats or mice, if he had been, he may never have found this
out.
o Some dogs were conditioned easier than others, some were never conditioned and so
he developed a classification of types called a typology
o He used terminology based on Galen and Hippocrates
o Melancholic dogs
o Choleric dogs
o Phlegmatic dogs - Newfoundland dogs
o Sanguine dogs - typical Jack Russel and Border Collie
Réale et al. (2007)
o The Big Five Factors
o Reactivity including shyness and boldness, what the response is in a risky situation
o Exploration/avoidance
o Activity
o Aggressiveness - likelihood to engage in aggression
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o Sociability - likelihood to have a social interaction with the same species
General Personality Traits? OR Situational?
o Walter Mischel - sometimes you don't have situational consistency
o The idea that you can have somebody at home is extremely submissive but is
dominant in the workplace
o Personality is context dependent
o This is on the radar for psychologists but not biologist
o Situational factor - in personality psychology, Walter Mischel is known for this
o Ex. The wife or husband that is submissive at home but is a strong leader at work,
vice versa. Thus it is possible to have two personalities in a sense
o Could be situational
Shy-bold continuum
o Patterns may not be as simple as we thought based on what we think
o Kagan has mentioned this for decades, but it developed from kids
o Such as if you have a shy kid, you're going to be shy when you grow up
o Boldness means a tendency to take risks, sensation seekers
Experimental set-up to study bold and shy fish
o Difference in sampling, fish that go in the minnow trap are much more likely to be the bold
type
o Seine trapped fish show the entire spectrum, your just picking up any fish that are in your
way
o Are bold fish also stupid?
o Differentiating between the two is difficult and a question of perspective
o The way you collect animals may influence your study
o You're going to know more about a bold animal than a shy animal - thus this affects
your data
Fast and Slow Birds
o Activity score
o Slow birds are more followers, so they don't have foraging patterns
o If you are interested in social dynamic, this becomes a predictor of leadership or becoming
a dominant animal
Applications of Animal Personality Research in Conservation Biology
o One of the areas we often call conservation behaviour
o It seems to suggest something else
Testing Personality
o Personality should be consistent and repeatable
o Temperament is heritable
o Thus we are able to selectively breed them
Strategies to Study Behavior Syndromes
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o Puzzling behaviours are behaviours that don't fit the profile
o Outliers are very informative, in science we usually jump to the conclusion that
outliers need to be disposed of
o However, sometimes outliers are more important than we think
o Temperament
o Biologists as opposed to psychologists and neuroscientists don't like to differentiate
between temperament and personality
o During breeding season, when the days are longer and melatonin is supressed,
testosterone is increased and some individuals become a lot bolder
Examples of Domain-Specific Individual differences for the candidate behaviour approach
o Neophobia - reactions to new objects and individuals in a new way
o Exploratory behaviour - if you explore a lot, you are putting yourself at risk
o Alpha male in a wolf pack, there was a carcass and told a beta and a gamma wolf to
go check it out. He was not taking any risks because that pack had been shot and
hunted a few times. Thus he was very smart in making other wolves go check it out
Fitness Consequences Of Personality
o The more social complexity you have, the more likely you will find a wide array of
personality differences
o Bold males tent to have an increased reproductive success but only before they cross over
to stupid
o We call this "judgement" in humans
o First wave of individuals you put out in the wild has a higher
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