Establishing a Link Between Personality and Social Rank in a Group of Bottlenose Dolphins (\u3ci\u3eTursiops truncatus\u3c/i\u3e)

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have been documented to possess personality traits that remain consistent over time (Highfill & Kuczaj, 2007) and across contexts (Kuczaj, Highfill, & Byerly, 2012). Such individual differences are thought to play an important role in various social contexts such as hierarchical dominance (Highfill & Kuczaj, 2010). The present study investigated the relationship between personality and social rank within a captive group of bottlenose dolphins housed at the Roatan Institute for Marine Science (RIMS). Social rank was established using questionnaires distributed to the RIMS experienced staff. Personality traits were derived from behavioral coding using context-specific correlational matrices. The traits were then correlated to each dolphin’s social rank position. The results suggest that a relationship between individual personality and social status is present, but complex. Traits that emerged exhibited sex-differences. Of the 12 factors found for the males, sexual (DID), contact seeking (DIO) and camaraderie (DID) were significantly related to social rank. For the females, only factors playful (DIO) and evasive (DIH) were significantly related to social rank. Individuals ranked at both extremes of the hierarchy (highest and lowest) seem to exhibit a more correlative relationship between personality and social status. However, other factors appear to play an important role in this relationship for middle-ranked dolphins. These results suggest that factors such as age, strength of associations between individuals, maternal style, and interactions between the male and female hierarchies all influence how personality is expressed in different contexts

Who Bullies and When? Concurrent, Longitudinal, and Experimental Associations between Personality and Social Environments for Adolescent Bullying Perpetration

Increasing evidence suggests that bullying may be used by adolescents as a strategic, adaptive tool against weaker peers to obtain valued resources like social status and romantic partners. However, bullying perpetration may only be adaptive within particular environmental contexts that provide opportunities to obtain these resources at minimal costs. These environmental opportunities may be relevant for adolescents who possess particular personality traits and are motivated to exploit these contexts and power imbalances. Using an adaptive social ecological framework, the primary goal of my dissertation was to examine concurrent, longitudinal, and experimental associations between exploitative personality traits and broader social ecologies to facilitate adolescent bullying perpetration. In Study 1, I examined whether risky social environments filtered through antisocial personality traits to facilitate direct and indirect forms of bullying perpetration in a cross-sectional sample of 396 adolescents. In Study 2, I extended Study 1 by investigating the longitudinal associations among bullying, empathic and exploitative personality traits, and social environmental variables, in a sample of 560 adolescents across the first three years of high school. Given that Studies 1 and 2 were correlational, in Study 3, I explored whether bullying perpetration could be experimentally simulated in a laboratory setting through point allocations in the Dictator and Ultimatum economic games by manipulating power imbalances in a sample of 167 first-year undergraduate students. Results from all three studies largely supported the prediction that broader social ecologies filter through exploitative personality styles to associate with bullying perpetration. Exploitative adolescents are primarily likely to take advantage of particular contexts including power advantages, higher social status, and poorer school and neighborhood climates. The results of my dissertation demonstrate the complex reality of the social ecology of bullying, and the need for anti-bullying initiatives to target multiple contexts including individual differences

Context matters:multiple novelty tests reveal different aspects of shyness-boldness in farmed American mink (<i>Neovison vison</i>)

Animal personality research is receiving increasing interest from related fields, such as evolutionary personality psychology. By merging the conceptual understanding of personality, the contributions to both fields of research may be enhanced. In this study, we investigate animal personality based on the definition of personality traits as underlying dispositional factors, which are not directly measurable, but which predispose individuals to react through different behavioural patterns. We investigated the shyness-boldness continuum reflected in the consistency of inter-individual variation in behavioural responses towards novelty in 47 farmed American mink (Neovison vison), which were raised in identical housing conditions. Different stages of approach behaviour towards novelty, and how these related within and across contexts, were explored. Our experimental design contained four tests: two novel object tests (non-social contexts) and two novel animated stimuli tests (social contexts). Our results showed consistency in shyness measures across multiple tests, indicating the existence of personality in farmed American mink. It was found that consistency in shyness measures differs across non-social and social contexts, as well as across the various stages in the approach towards novel objects, revealing that different aspects of shyness exist in the farmed American mink. To our knowledge this is the first study to reveal aspects of the shyness-boldness continuum in the American mink. Since the mink were raised in identical housing conditions, inherited factors may have been important in shaping the consistent inter-individual variation. Body weight and sex had no effect on the personality of the mink. Altogether, our results suggest that the shyness-boldness continuum cannot be explained by a simple underlying dispositional factor, but instead encompasses a broader term of hesitating behaviour that might comprise several different personality traits

Psychological and sociodemographic correlates of communicative anxiety in L2 and L3 production

This paper analyses foreign language anxiety in the French L2 and English L3 speech production of 100 Flemish students. The findings suggest that foreign language anxiety is not a stable personality trait among experienced language learners. The societal as well as the individual contexts were found to determine levels of communicative anxiety. The perception of French as the former prestige language in Flanders and its function as a social marker was found to be linked to the participants' social class, which was, in turn, linked to levels of anxiety in French - but not in English. This social effect appeared to be a stronger predictor of communicative anxiety in French than three personality variables (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). Psychoticism, extraversion, and, to a lesser extent, neuroticism did however significantly predict levels of communicative anxiety in English L3 production. Students who scored high on the extraversion and psychoticism scales reported significant lower levels of communicative anxiety in English. Those who scored low on the neuroticism scale also tended to report lower levels of communicative anxiety in English. The same pattern emerged for communicative anxiety in French without reaching statistical significance

SALSA: A Novel Dataset for Multimodal Group Behavior Analysis

Studying free-standing conversational groups (FCGs) in unstructured social settings (e.g., cocktail party ) is gratifying due to the wealth of information available at the group (mining social networks) and individual (recognizing native behavioral and personality traits) levels. However, analyzing social scenes involving FCGs is also highly challenging due to the difficulty in extracting behavioral cues such as target locations, their speaking activity and head/body pose due to crowdedness and presence of extreme occlusions. To this end, we propose SALSA, a novel dataset facilitating multimodal and Synergetic sociAL Scene Analysis, and make two main contributions to research on automated social interaction analysis: (1) SALSA records social interactions among 18 participants in a natural, indoor environment for over 60 minutes, under the poster presentation and cocktail party contexts presenting difficulties in the form of low-resolution images, lighting variations, numerous occlusions, reverberations and interfering sound sources; (2) To alleviate these problems we facilitate multimodal analysis by recording the social interplay using four static surveillance cameras and sociometric badges worn by each participant, comprising the microphone, accelerometer, bluetooth and infrared sensors. In addition to raw data, we also provide annotations concerning individuals' personality as well as their position, head, body orientation and F-formation information over the entire event duration. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art approaches, we show (a) the limitations of current methods and (b) how the recorded multiple cues synergetically aid automatic analysis of social interactions. SALSA is available at http://tev.fbk.eu/salsa.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Personalized Dialogue Generation with Diversified Traits

Endowing a dialogue system with particular personality traits is essential to deliver more human-like conversations. However, due to the challenge of embodying personality via language expression and the lack of large-scale persona-labeled dialogue data, this research problem is still far from well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the problem of incorporating explicit personality traits in dialogue generation to deliver personalized dialogues. To this end, firstly, we construct PersonalDialog, a large-scale multi-turn dialogue dataset containing various traits from a large number of speakers. The dataset consists of 20.83M sessions and 56.25M utterances from 8.47M speakers. Each utterance is associated with a speaker who is marked with traits like Age, Gender, Location, Interest Tags, etc. Several anonymization schemes are designed to protect the privacy of each speaker. This large-scale dataset will facilitate not only the study of personalized dialogue generation, but also other researches on sociolinguistics or social science. Secondly, to study how personality traits can be captured and addressed in dialogue generation, we propose persona-aware dialogue generation models within the sequence to sequence learning framework. Explicit personality traits (structured by key-value pairs) are embedded using a trait fusion module. During the decoding process, two techniques, namely persona-aware attention and persona-aware bias, are devised to capture and address trait-related information. Experiments demonstrate that our model is able to address proper traits in different contexts. Case studies also show interesting results for this challenging research problem.Comment: Please contact [zhengyinhe1 at 163 dot com] for the PersonalDialog datase

Personality, Emotion and Judgment in Virtual Environments: A Theoretical Framework

As organizations become increasingly reliant on distributive technologies, the processes that underpin the effective functioning of employees in virtual environments require systematic examination. This article provides a theoretical framework for studying personality, emotion and judgment in virtual environments. The communication media characteristics, social context, and individual traits and states are presented to portray the dynamic nature of judgment formation in a virtual environment. We argue that media characteristics, combined with personality, motivation and emergent social contexts serve to shape emotions and resultant judgments. By integrating the Information Systems (IS) and Organizational Behavior/Psychology literatures, we chart a course for research examining personality, emotion and judgments, with implications for any distributed organization

Inferring User Personality from Twitter

Personality affects how a person behaves when interacting with people and computer systems. It can determine one’s needs and preferences in different contexts, which is especially useful for adaptive and recommender systems. Personality questionnaires are widely used to acquire information about user personality. However, filling in them can be tedious. Analyzing the user interactions can be another way of obtaining that information. Since personality has an impact on the way a person interacts with others, and social networks are widely used for this purpose, information about user interactions through social networks can give a clue about their personality. In this paper, we present a system able to obtain data about user interactions in Twitter and analyze them in order to infer user personality. The system has been used not only to infer personality but also to compare and evaluate different user models, classifiers and personality dimensionsThis work has been funded by the BLIND, project BLIND (BLIND) and by BLIND, project BLIND (BLIND). We also thank all the people that participated in this research fulfilling the personality test

An Integrated Approach to Personality Assessment Based on the Personality Systems Framework

Psychologists who carry out personality assessments must be conversant in diverse technical languages to describe their clients’ social contexts and inner personality function. The clinician needs to understand a person’s family, gender role, ethnic identity, religious beliefs, and similar qualities, and also a client’s inner personality functioning, including the workings of motives, emotions. cognition, and self-control: these may be characterized by relevant psychiatric symptoms, personality traits, and individual test scores such as those on the MMPI-2-RF and Rorschach-Performance Assessment System. The Personality Systems Framework for Assessment (PSF-A) can support the assessment process by organizing information about both an individual’s context and personality function, freeing the professional to optimally focus on characterizing their clients

Work, Family, and Personality: Transition to Adulthood [book review]

It is perhaps too common and conventional to praise a monograph as an invaluable contribution to a particular research area, but Work, Family, and Personality is indeed worthy of such praise. This book presents a unique study of the two most important socialization contexts for adults - work and family - and specifies their intricate linkages. It is important reading for scholars interested in work and family, those concerned with stability and change in personality through the life course, and those studying the interplay of social structure and personality