DISSERTATION RESEARCH: The role of the social environment in promoting consistent individual differences in responsiveness and other behaviors in sticklebacks

动物个性，也称为行为综合征和气质，是指在不同时间和/或环境中行为的一致性个体差异。 该领域寻求能够解释为什么个体行为一致以及为什么他们彼此行为不同的机制。 最近的模型表明，反应能力，或者说一个人对环境变化的敏感程度，可能是行为变异的一个特别重要的轴。 虽然社会环境对人格特质的重要性在人类人格研究中早已被认识到，但这一因素在动物人格研究中才刚刚开始受到关注。 这个项目的目标是调查重复的社会互动如何促进反应和其他人格特质的一致性个体差异。 拟议中的研究将揭示社会熟悉度是否会促进个体行为的一致性，以及群体组成的变化是否会导致个体改变他们的行为。 这些研究将使用三刺鱼，这是一种行为模式生物，在反应能力和其他人格特征方面表现出广泛的差异。本着这项赠款的精神，与当地一所高中的合作已经开始，在AP生物课程的学生将使用刺鱼来了解环境对行为的影响。 学生将开发，设计和执行自己的实验，以确定如何棘鱼？面对环境压力时的行为变化;最终结果将是学生将给他们的同龄人和老师的海报演示。 鉴于人类对环境的快速变化，理解为什么有些人比其他人更容易对环境变化做出反应具有重要的保护意义。此外，了解包括人类在内的不同生物体的反应差异的原因，可以深入了解弹性的个体差异，或者为什么有些人比其他人更容易受到负面生活经历的影响。

Animal personality, also known as behavioral syndromes and temperament, refers to consistent individual differences in behaviors across time and/or contexts. This field seeks mechanisms that can explain why individuals behave consistently and why they behave differently from each other. Recent models suggest that responsiveness, or how sensitive an individual is to changes in their environment, might be an especially important axis of behavioral variation. While the importance of the social environment on personality traits has long been recognized in human personality research, this factor is only starting to gain attention in animal personality research. The goal of this project is to investigate how repeated social interactions might promote consistent individual differences in responsiveness and other personality traits. The proposed studies will reveal whether social familiarity promotes individual behavioral consistency and whether changes in group composition cause individuals to modify their behavior. These studies will use threespine sticklebacks, a model behavioral organism that demonstrates extensive variation in responsiveness and other personality traits. In the spirit of this grant, collaboration with a local high school has been initiated, where students in the AP biology course will use sticklebacks to learn about environmental influences on behavior. Students will develop, design and execute their own experiments to determine how sticklebacks? behavior changes in the face of environmental stressors; the end result will be poster presentations that the students will give to their peers and teachers. Given the rapid rate of anthropogenic change to the environment, understanding why some individuals are more responsive to environmental change than others has important conservation implications. Moreover, understanding the causes of variation in responsiveness in diverse organisms, including humans, can provide insight into individual differences in resilience, or why some people are more affected by negative life experiences than others.