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

动物人格，也被称为行为综合症和气质，是指在不同时间和/或背景下，个体在行为上的一致差异。这个领域寻找的机制可以解释为什么个人的行为是一致的，以及为什么他们的行为彼此不同。最近的模型表明，响应性，即一个人对环境变化的敏感度，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得到认可，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个体在反应能力和其他人格特征上的一致差异。这项拟议的研究将揭示社会熟悉度是否会促进个人行为的一致性，以及群体构成的变化是否会导致个人改变自己的行为。这些研究将使用三刺鱼，这是一种模型行为有机体，显示出反应能力和其他人格特征的广泛差异。本着这笔赠款的精神，已经启动了与当地一所高中的合作，在那里，AP生物学课程的学生将使用刺鱼来学习环境对行为的影响。学生们将开发、设计和执行他们自己的实验，以确定如何刺痛？面对环境压力，学生的行为会发生变化；最终的结果将是学生向同龄人和老师展示的海报演示文稿。鉴于人类对环境的快速变化，理解为什么一些个体比其他个体对环境变化更敏感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中反应能力差异的原因，可以洞察个体在韧性方面的差异，或者为什么一些人比其他人更受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.