Journal
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOBIOLOGY
Volume 53, Issue 6, Pages 521-548Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/dev.20544
Keywords
animal personalities; behavioral profiles; behavioral style; behavioral syndromes; behavioral types; characters; correlated traits; individual differences; individuality; personality; personality traits; temperament
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Funding
- Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (German Science Foundation) [UH249/1-1]
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Animal researchers are increasingly interested in individual differences in behavior. Their interpretation as meaningful differences in behavioral strategies stable over time and across contexts, adaptive, heritable, and acted upon by natural selection has triggered new theoretical developments. However, the analytical approaches used to explore behavioral data still address population-level phenomena, and statistical methods suitable to analyze individual behavior are rarely applied. I discuss fundamental investigative principles and analytical approaches to explore whether, in what ways, and under which conditions individual behavioral differences are actually meaningful. I elaborate the meta-theoretical ideas underlying common theoretical concepts and integrate them into an overarching meta-theoretical and methodological framework. This unravels commonalities and differences, and shows that assumptions of analogy to concepts of human personality are not always warranted and that some theoretical developments may be based on methodological artifacts. Yet, my results also highlight possible directions for new theoretical developments in animal behavior research. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 53: 521-548, 2011.
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