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Non-human contributions to personality neuroscience – from fish through primates

Guest Editors:

Neil McNaughton, Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Yury V. Lages, Department of Psychology, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil


This special issue has two main purposes: (1) to help consolidate the scientific field of animal psychology as applied to personality; and (2) to draw the value of animal work, which is well recognised in the neuroscience of mainstream psychology, to the attention of those applying neuroscience to personality research.

Of necessity, some work focuses on analysis of a single trait or single example of psychopathology. But, nonetheless, the conclusions are to be linked to personality in general; and help to draw together currently disparate approaches. They make clear the more general applications of the work. We hope this approach will help to unite the currently separate top-down (e.g., Big-5 – linked to our inclusion of work on primates) and bottom-up (e.g., Eysenck/Gray – linked to our inclusion of work on rodents) perspectives on personality; and to help unite these perspectives with the new hierarchical trait view of psychopathology (e.g., HiTOP – linked to the use of animal strains as trait models of psychopathology).

Our aim was to be as broad and inclusive as possible; so as to hit home in the heartlands of mainstream personality psychology. Importantly, we aimed to showcase animal work as a means of comparative and phylogenetic analysis of personality that can particularly enhance understanding of psychopathology, social interaction, genetics and physiology. We solicited brief reviews/overviews that would fill the, essentially philosophical, purpose of making animal work accessible to those who normally work only with humans. Our aim was text suitable for a more general audience.

The special issue has two editorials: one is a general introduction to the area and the second is a concluding overview summarising the specific messages of the papers included and organising them by topic. The latter organises the submissions into subsections devoted to: 1) primate work that can connect more easily to the Big5 and thence to the comparative approach (including work on fish); 2) rat work (ethology and specific papers on a range of rat strains, with a focus on trait links to psychopathology; 3) fish work (with a distinct but clear focus on psychopathology; and, 4) a final more philosophical overview of what we mean by personality and so to which organisms it should be attributed. For technical reasons the papers are not organised into these sections by the journal and so this concluding paper should be used as a guide to the intellectual organisation of the special issues as a whole.

Review Paper

Editorial

Review Paper

Empirical Paper

Review Paper