Animal Personality

Abstract

& Vazire, 2002), which culminated in outlining a research program for animal personality research. The outline consisted of three phases: • Phase 1: Review, summarize, and evaluate previous research. • Phase 2: Address measurement issues and develop assessment methods. • Phase 3: Use animal models to address basic and applied issues in personality research and elsewhere. In this article, we summarize the state of research on animal personality, organizing the research in terms of these three phases. Phase 1: Literature Reviews The purpose of the first phase of the research program was to establish the conceptual and empirical foundations of comparative personality research. To do this, I reviewed and summarized the literature pertaining to personality in nonhuman animals. The reviews revealed that a wide range of studies had been performed but they were scattered across a disparate array of disciplines, including psychology, veterinary medicine, primatology, and agricultural science. To examine the historical trends in publications on animal personality we conducted a PsychINFO search for the period 1907 and 2007. We searched for articles in which animals were listed as the population and used the keywords "personality, " "tem-perament, " and "behavioral syndromes. " The data, which are plotted in Figure 1, show that up until the 1990s, scarcely any research was published on animal personality. After that, publications began to appear , with a particularly dramatic rise during the last decade. In fact, the last five years (2002-2007) saw more than double the number of articles published in the previous five years (1997-2001), and the number of articles appearing in the last decade substantially exceeds the number of articles published over the previous century (118).