Doctoral Dissertation Research: Personality, Stress Response, and Social Complexity in Primates

个性差异似乎对人类的社交生活和人际关系有很多影响。鉴于一个人的人际关系是从与他人的社会互动中发展起来的，而且互动可能会带来压力，一个重要的问题是，压力反应中的个性差异如何影响社会关系。这个博士论文项目将通过收集行为和(非侵入性)荷尔蒙数据，在一个非人类灵长类动物模型中调查应激反应的变化。鉴于越来越多的证据表明，压力和社会关系的管理影响个人(人类和非人类)的身心健康，了解应对社会压力的差异如何影响灵长类动物的社会生活是很重要的。该项目将为罗格斯大学的本科生提供实验室研究机会，特别是那些来自STEM领域代表性不足的群体的学生。将向当地社区提供保护、生态和野生动物管理方面的科学宣传和培训。该项目的成果将在高等院校公布，目的是解释这项研究和生物人类学对整个社会的贡献。这项研究将调查自然形成长期关系的野生群居灵长类动物在应对压力方面的个体差异。与大多数非灵长类动物模型相比，橄榄狒狒在行为和社交方面都更加复杂，它将为研究人类的压力反应变化提供比较数据。研究人员将收集行为和荷尔蒙数据，并使用网络分析来研究攻击性、梳理和空间接近，并观察单个狒狒对各种压力情况的反应。这项工作的结果将有助于了解社会关系的维持，不同类型的压力应对的后果，以及这些变量如何相互作用。这些结果对于理解某些人如何平衡应对压力的问题和他们社会生活的方方面面很重要。

Personality differences appear to have many influences on the social lives and relationships of humans. Given that an individual's relationships develop from social interactions with others, and that interactions can be stressful, an important question is how personality differences in the stress response influence social relationships. This doctoral dissertation project will investigate variation in stress response in a non-human primate model, with collection of behavioral and (non-invasive) hormonal data. Understanding how variation in coping with social stress affects the social lives of primates is important in light of growing evidence that the management of both stress and social relationships influences the mental and physical health of individuals (human and non-human). This project will provide laboratory research opportunities to Rutgers undergraduate students, particularly those from groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields. Science outreach and training in conservation, ecology, and wildlife management will be provided to local communities. The results of this project will be presented at institutions of higher learning with the goal of explaining the contributions of this research and of biological anthropology to society at large. This research will investigate how wild social primates, with naturally formed long-term relationships, individually differ in how they cope with stress. The olive baboon, more behaviorally and socially complex than most non-primate models, will provide comparative data for studying stress response variation in humans. The investigator will collect behavioral and hormonal data and use network analysis to study aggression, grooming, and spatial proximity, and observe how individual baboons react to various stressful situations. The results of this work will contribute knowledge about the maintenance of social relationships, the consequences of different types of stress coping, and how these variables interact with one another. These outcomes are important for understanding how certain individuals balance the problem of coping with stress with aspects of their social lives.