Lauren Highfill

This chapter reviews the benefits of adopting the interpersonal circumplex as a supplement to current approaches for understanding animal personality. The interpersonal circumplex is a representation of social behavior that is organized in a circular fashion as it is defined by a two-coordinate system consisting of agency (as the vertical axis) and communion (as the horizontal axis). The interpersonal circumplex was developed to describe and understand the social behavior of humans. We believe that the interpersonal circumplex may be helpful in gaining a better understanding of animal personality as well, because it may have implications for (1) conceptualizing the structure of animal personality and (2) accounting for the role of social behavior in animal personality. We review the limited research that has been conducted using the interpersonal circumplex in animals and suggest directions for future research.

Although emotions have proven difficult to define, they nonetheless influence the lives of humans and non-human animals. Processing emotions is particularly important for members of species with dynamic social lives. For such animals, the ability to recognize and respond to the emotional states of others facilitates successful social interactions. For example, dolphins live in dynamic fission/fusion societies, and it seems likely that dolphins are sensitive to the emotional states of other dolphins. In this chapter, we consider the evidence for emotional states and emotional recognition in dolphins from a comparative perspective. This includes a discussion of methodologies used to study emotions in animals as well as a consideration of the overlap between animal personality research and animal emotion research. We conclude that there are many challenges facing those who study animal emotions, but also believe that a better understanding of animal emotions will increase our understanding of animal behavior and our ability to improve the welfare of wild animals in captivity and domestic animals.