Future Directions for Personality Research: Contributing New Insights to the Understanding of Animal Behavior

Abstract

As part of the European Conference on Behavioral Biology 2018, we organized a symposium entitled, “Animal personality: providing new insights into behavior?” The aims of this symposium were to address current research in the personality field, spanning both behavioral ecology and psychology, to highlight the future directions for this research, and to consider whether differential approaches to studying behavior contribute something new to the understanding of animal behavior. In this paper, we discuss the study of endocrinology and ontogeny in understanding how behavioral variation is generated and maintained, despite selection pressures assumed to reduce this variation. We consider the potential mechanisms that could link certain traits to fitness outcomes through longevity and cognition. We also address the role of individual differences in stress coping, mortality, and health risk, and how the study of these relationships could be applied to improve animal welfare. From the insights provided by these topics, we assert that studying individual differences through the lens of personality has provided new directions in behavioral research, and we encourage further research in these directions, across this interdisciplinary field.

Investigating Personality in Polar Bears Using the Concept of Behavioral Instability

“…The difference found in the two individuals' responses to olfactory stimuli is a good example of how individuals can respond differently to environmental stress indicating a difference in their personalities. This exhibits how the understanding of different personalities is important in the evaluation of welfare in captive animals [5], implying that different individuals can benefit from different types of enrichment in order to increase their welfare. When exposed to olfactory stimuli, there was a significant difference between the two individuals in the amount of time each spent on stereotypic and inactive behavior, respectively (Appendix B).…”

“…This can provide researchers with a relatively unbiased evaluation of personality and the effectiveness of enrichment manipulation, which can contribute to the improvement of enrichment programs and animal welfare in captivity [13]. It has been debated whether the study of personality can provide new insights for the field of behavioral ecology [5]. The use of behavioral instability as a new quantitative and systematic method for studying personality could be highly relevant when studying animal conservation.…”

“…The personality of an animal can influence its welfare, as these responses can vary between individuals, i.e. an environmental condition may be well tolerated by one individual, but not by another [5]. Stereotypic behavior is described as a repetitive motion with no apparent purpose and has generally been shown to be a sign of stress, due to its correlation with increased corticoid levels, thus making stereotypy an indication of poor welfare [6,7].…”

“…Several studies have shown that enrichment and the presence of choice in activity is negatively correlated with stereotypy [9,11,13]. However, other studies have shown that not all enrichments improve welfare when measured in time spent on stereotypy [12], this could be explained by the variation in the tested individuals' personalities [5]. Personality has been found in different bears [1], but only few studies exist for polar bears, most of them studying stereotypic behavior in general [10,11,14].…”

The boon and bane of boldness: movement syndrome as saviour and sink for population genetic diversity

“…Furthermore, the combination of high variability in spatial behaviour of felids (e.g. dispersal distances of jaguar [82] or lynx [83] and home range size of leopards [84] or lynx [85]) and limited samples common with telemetry-based research [86], suggests the importance of behavioural syndromes could be found if studies had sufficient power [87]. Using different parameterisations, we could evaluate a range of scenarios and identify potential trade-offs between movement behaviour and population level genetic metrics.…”