Personality in animals
The Animal Self – New York Times
Interesting read on the return of personality psych (and the use of the term “personality”) to ethology.
Some tidbits:
It was back in 1991 that Anderson and Jennifer Mather, a psychologist from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, first decided to undertake a joint personality study of 44 smaller red octopuses at the aquarium as a way to begin to codify and systematize what they thought they had been observing. Using three categorizations from a standard human-personality-assessment test – shy, aggressive and passive – their data would ultimately show that the animals did consistently clump together under these different categories in response to various stimuli, like touching them with a bristly test-tube brush or dropping a crab into the tank.
“The aggressive ones would pounce on the crab,” Anderson told me. “The passive ones would wait for the crab to come past and then grab it. The shy animal would wait till overnight when no one was looking, and we’d find this little pile of crab shell in the morning.”
Anderson and Mather’s resulting 1993 paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, entitled “Personalities of Octopuses,” was not only the first-ever documentation of personality in invertebrates. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that the term “personality” had been applied to a nonhuman in a major psychology journal.
And,
Alison Bell has done related experiments with sticklebacks. It has long been clear to researchers that fish that have lived for many generations in the proximity of dangerous predators are less bold and less aggressive than animals that have lived relatively risk-free. What Bell discovered is that those cautious tendencies outlast the presence of risk, even by a generation. When she moved sticklebacks who had always lived in a high-risk environment into a low-risk environment, she found that not only did they retain their cautious tendencies, but so did their offspring. Even fish raised from birth in a low-risk environment behave more fearfully if raised by a particularly vigilant father from a high-risk background.
“There’s definitely the effect of genetic difference,” Bell explained, “but there’s also the effect of what is experienced as they grow up. Genotype and environment interactions make it difficult to detect the effects of genes, because you have to take the environment into account. This is annoying to geneticists.” To scientists like Bell who are studying the interplay of genes and environment, however, it is of profound interest.