Dissertation Research: Behavioral Style and its Endocrine Correlates in Young Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

许多心理学家研究了人格在调节人类如何对待生活中的重要作用。生理人类学家和灵长类动物学家在很大程度上忽略了非人类灵长类动物的这一变量，转而专注于群体生活的个体在社会等级中的支配地位的重要性。但事实证明，使用支配地位来预测压力水平等变量往往不令人满意：人们发现，支配地位与基线激素水平等变量只有微弱的相关性。在这个项目中，研究人员将考虑个性或行为风格的作用，作为解释非人类灵长类个体之间差异的额外变量。具体来说，将收集路易斯安那州新伊比利亚的西南路易斯安那大学研究中心圈养的同居幼年黑猩猩的行为和生理数据。然后，在定义行为风格的变量方面排名相似的个人将被比较。例如，个人X在挑选他/她能赢的战斗方面做得有多好？个人Y在建立有价值的友谊方面有多熟练？预计这些变量可能不会与排名完全相关；例如，排名较低的人实际上可能非常擅长挑选可能获胜的战斗。不同行为风格的个体将比较尿液和血清激素水平，以评估优势等级和行为风格对应激生理、健康和生长的相对影响。据预测，对行为风格的考虑将比仅考虑优势等级更全面地了解影响群内关系和生理参数的因素，并将拓宽我们对灵长类社会生态学的研究途径。

Many psychologists have studied the influential role of personality in mediating how humans approach life. Physical anthropologists and primatologists have largely ignored this variable in nonhuman primates, focusing instead on the significance of a group-living individual's dominance rank in the social hierarchy. But using dominance rank to predict variables such as stress levels often proves unsatisfactory: dominance has been found to only weakly correlate with variables such as baseline hormone levels. In this project the researcher will consider the role of personality or behavioral style as an additional variable that explains differences between nonhuman primate individuals. Specifically, behavioral and physiological data from captive, peer-housed groups of young chimpanzees at the University of Southwest Louisiana Research Center in New Iberia, Louisiana will be collected. Individuals of similar rank with respect to variables that define behavioral styles will then be compared. For example, how good is individual X at picking fights that he/she can win? How adept is individual Y at forming valuable friendships? It is expected that these variables may not perfectly correlate with rank; a low-ranking individual may actually be quite good at picking winnable fights, for example. Individuals with different behavioral styles will be compared for urinary and serum hormone levels in order to assess the relative effects of dominance rank and behavioral style on stress physiology, health, and growth. It is predicted that consideration of behavioral style will provide for a fuller understanding of the factors affecting intra-group relations and physiological parameters than dominance rank alone, and will broaden our approach to primate socioecology.