Archived Abstracts
Do "birds of a feather flock together" or do "opposites attract"? Behavioral responses and temperament predict success in pairings of rhesus monkeys in a laboratory setting.
Authors: John P. Capitanio, Shelley A. Blozis, Jessica Snarr, Adrianne Steward, Brenda J. McCowan.
As the Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare has stated “There is universal agreement among oversight agencies that nonhuman primates should be socially housed.” Achieving this goal can be challenging, however. In a laboratory setting, social housing is sometimes accomplished by pairing animals, but the literature is unclear on whether use of pre-pairing behavioral/temperament information can increase the success rate of pairings. What kind of behavioral information might be most useful? And once identified, is success increased when animals are most similar or if animals’ characteristics complement each other? We extracted a database comprising n=340 isosexual pairing attempts at the California National Primate Research Center, in which both members of the pair had participated in a BioBehavioral Assessment program at 3-4 months of age; pairing attempts occurred when animals ranged from 1.2 to 11.1 years of age. Among females, success was higher when members of a pair had similar values (i.e., a smaller difference score) on measures of emotional responding during the infant assessments. In contrast, among males, pairing success was more likely when members of the pair had lower averaged values for Gentle and Nervous temperament scores; when they were younger; when pairs had a greater weight difference; and when they came from the same rearing background. Together, our results suggest that broad measures reflecting patterns of emotionality in response to challenge, which can be assessed in infancy (but which remain relatively stable throughout life) can be usefully employed to increase the likelihood of success in pairing attempts.
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