Citation

Author Website

Ralph Adolphs: https://emotion.caltech.edu/

Yue Xu: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~yxu7/index.html

Commentary Type

Invited Commentary

Thread

Karen A. Owens, Gosia Bryja, and Marc Bekoff, Wildlife conservation: The importance of individual personality traits and sentience

Abstract

We are grateful to Owens, Bryja & Bekoff (2024) for their important discussion of individual differences in animals, emphasizing the role of personality in conservation, wildlife research, and wellbeing. But their emphasis also raises new challenges: How should we conceive of personality in nonhuman species? what modern tools could be leveraged to best measure it? and, perhaps most important of all: how can we ensure that the conscious experience of animals — their capacity for wellbeing and for suffering — is not forgotten along the way? We touch on each of these challenges in this invited Precommentary in the hope that they will be taken up by other commentators.

Author Biography

Ralph Adolphs is Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology at the California Institute of Technology. His laboratory uses both neuroscience and psychology approaches to study human social cognition and emotion. Website

Yue Xu is a doctoral student in Caltech’s Computation and Neural Systems Program. Her research focuses on mathematical modelling of latent psychological traits and states, and trait impressions from faces. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1843