Evolutionary Perspective on the Interplay Between Family Life, and Parent and Offspring Personality

Abstract

Consistent inter‐individual variation in behaviour over time and across contexts has been reported for a wide variety of animals, a phenomenon commonly referred to as personality. As behavioural patterns develop inside families, rearing conditions could have lasting effects on the expression of adult personality. In species with parental care, conflicts among family members impose selection on parental and offspring behaviour through coadaptation. Here, we argue that the interplay between the evolution of personality traits (i.e. boldness, exploration, activity, aggressiveness and sociability) expressed outside the family context and the specialized behaviours expressed inside families (i.e. offspring begging behaviour and parental response to offspring solicitations) can have important evolutionary consequences. Personality differences between parents may relate to the typically observed variation in the way they respond to offspring demand, and dependent offspring may already express personality differences, which may relate to the way they communicate with their parents and siblings. However, there has been little research on how personality relates to parental and offspring behaviours. Future research should thus focus on how and why personality may be related to the specialized parent and offspring behaviour that evolved as adaptations to family life.

The effect of siblings on early development: A potential contributor to personality differences in mammals

“…This led us to consider the possibility that siblings, by influencing each other's early development, might contribute to shaping long-term differences in the suits of behavior variously referred to as personality, temperament, disposition, coping style, behavioral syndrome, or behavioral style. This interest has been reinforced by the increasing acceptance of the concept of animal personality among behavioral biologists, increasing evidence for the reality of such from a broad range of taxonomic groups (see reports in this issue), and by accounts as to how animal personality might be understood from a theoretical, evolutionary, and more recently, from a developmental perspective (Carere, Drent, Koolhaas, & Groothuis, 2005;Dall, Houston, & McNamara, 2004;Dingemanse & Réale, 2005;Eccard & Rödel, 2011;Gosling, 2001;Réale, Dingemanse, Kazem, & Wright, 2010;Roulin, Dreiss, & Kölliker, 2010;Sih, Bell, & Johnson, 2004;Trillmich & Groothuis, 2011;Stamps & Groothuis, 2010;Wolf, van Doorn, Leimar, & Weissing, 2007).…”

Evolutionary and ecological approaches to the study of personality

“…For example, two papers in this volume outline why it might be important to consider the evolution of personality in a metapopulation context where selection, gene flow, and dispersal favour the maintenance of personality types (Cote et al 2010b;. Furthermore, correlational selection (Brodie 1993;Sinervo & Svensson 2002) on the link between different traits might provide a powerful adaptive mechanism for the existence of suites of correlated traits (Bell & Sih 2007) Roulin et al 2010) offer interesting options to explain co-adaptation between personality and other traits. Finally, from a mechanistic point of view, progress in the study of coping styles has generated predictions concerning how hormonal, physiological and behavioural reactions should be correlated (Koolhaas et al 1999;Groothuis & Carere 2005; see §4b).…”

Parental provisioning behaviour plays a key role in linking personality with reproductive success

“…Moreover, we know relatively little about mechanistic pathways by which repeatable behaviour is translated into fitness, since those pathways are typically being implied rather than measured explicitly [21]. For example, is exploratory behaviour associated with reproductive success because it affects the acquisition of high-quality territories [17,22], or rather because it is associated with responsiveness towards variation in food resources [23,24] or offspring demands [25]? And which of these associations are directly due to exploratory tendency rather than representing indirect effects of aggressiveness?…”