In species with multiple paternity or maternity, animals may best assess their relatedness to unfamiliar conspeci¢cs by comparing their own phenotype(s) with those of unidenti¢ed individuals. Yet whether animals can recognize kin through self-matching is controversial. Because golden hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) mate multiply and can produce multiply sired litters, they were tested for their ability to use selfmatching for kin recognition. Hamsters that were reared only with non-kin since birth responded di¡erentially to odours of unfamiliar relatives and non-relatives. Postnatal association with kin was not necessary for this discrimination. Prenatal learning was unlikely because of delayed production and perception of social odours. To our knowledge, this is the ¢rst demonstration that a vertebrate can use its own phenotype for kin-recognition purposes without prior experience with kin. By using itself as a referent, rather than its siblings or parents, a golden hamster may be better able to direct nepotism towards the most appropriate individuals. Kin discrimination via self-inspection may be especially important in nepotistic contexts (to identify most closely related conspeci¢cs), whereas inclusion of the phenotypes of close kin as referents may be favoured in mate-choice contexts (to identify all related individuals).
In the current study, we explored how a person's physiological arousal relates to their performance in a challenging math situation as a function of individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity and math-anxiety. Participants completed demanding math problems before and after which salivary cortisol, an index of arousal, was measured. The performance of lower WM individuals did not depend on cortisol concentration or math-anxiety. For higher WM individuals high in math-anxiety, the higher their concentration of salivary cortisol following the math task, the worse their performance. In contrast, for higher WM individuals lower in math-anxiety, the higher their salivary cortisol concentrations, the better their performance. For individuals who have the capacity to perform at a high-level (higher WMs), whether physiological arousal will lead an individual to choke or thrive depends on math-anxiety.
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