Department of Psychology

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/12

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Browsing Department of Psychology by Subject "aggression"

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    Acute fluoxetine exposure alters crab anxiety-like behaviour, but not aggressiveness
    (2016) Hamilton, Trevor; Kwan, Garfield T.; Gallup, Joshua; Tresguerres, Martin
    Aggression and responsiveness to noxious stimuli are adaptable traits that are ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. Like vertebrate animals, some invertebrates have been shown to exhibit anxiety-like behaviour and altered levels of aggression that are modulated by the neurotransmitter serotonin. To investigate whether this influence of serotonin is conserved in crabs and whether these behaviours are sensitive to human antidepressant drugs; the striped shore crab, Pachygrapsus crassipes, was studied using anxiety (light/dark test) and aggression (mirror test) paradigms. Crabs were individually exposed to acute doses of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, fluoxetine (5 or 25 mg/L), commonly known as Prozac®, followed by behavioural testing. The high dose of fluoxetine significantly decreased anxiety-like behaviour but had no impact on mobility or aggression. These results suggest that anxiety-like behaviour is more sensitive to modulation of serotonin than is aggressiveness in the shore crab.
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    Human preferences for sexually dimorphic faces may be evolutionarily novel
    (2014) Scott, Isabel; Clark, Andrew; Josephson, Steven; Boyette, Adam; Cuthill, Innes; Fried, Ruby; Gibson, Mhairi; Hewlett, Barry; Jamieson, Mark; Jankowiak, William; Honey, P. Lynne; Huang, Zejun; Liebert, Melissa; Purzycki, Benjamin; Shaver, John; Snodgrass, Josh; Sosis, Richard; Sugiyama, Lawrence; Swami, Viren; Yu, Douglas; Zhao, Yangke; Penton-Voak, Ian
    A large literature proposes that preferences for exaggerated sex typicality in human faces (masculinity/femininity) reflect a long evolutionary history of sexual and social selection. This proposal implies that dimorphism was important to judgments of attractiveness and personality in ancestral environments. It is difficult to evaluate, however, because most available data come from large-scale, industrialized, urban populations. Here, we report the results for 12 populations with very diverse levels of economic development. Surprisingly, preferences for exaggerated sex-specific traits are only found in the novel, highly developed environments. Similarly, perceptions that masculine males look aggressive increase strongly with development and, specifically, urbanization. These data challenge the hypothesis that facial dimorphism was an important ancestral signal of heritable mate value. One possibility is that highly developed environments provide novel opportunities to discern relationships between facial traits and behavior by exposing individuals to large numbers of unfamiliar faces, revealing patterns too subtle to detect with smaller samples.
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    Seeing orange: breeding convict cichlids exhibit heightened aggression against more colorful intruders
    (2015) Anderson, C.; Jones, R.; Moscicki, Michele; Clotfelter, E.; Earley, R. L.
    Female convict cichlids (Amatitlania siquia) exhibit bright orange ventral coloration that males lack. The behavioral implications of this color are poorly understood, particularly in naturally occurring populations where female coloration could play a role in the expression of territorial nest-guarding behaviors. In this field experiment, monogamous breeding pairs of convict cichlids were presented with 3D printed model conspecific intruders of three body sizes (small, medium, and large) exhibiting three orange patch sizes (large, small, or none) to observe how territorial aggression varied as a function of intruder size and female coloration. Individuals occupying breeding pairs that were defending hatched offspring were significantly more aggressive toward intruders with small and large amounts of orange than toward models lacking orange, indicating that color is an important contextdependent elicitor of aggression in this species. Males were significantly more aggressive toward the intruder than females, and male aggression was strongly influenced by their size relative to the intruder. When males were smaller than the intruder, they performed significantly more aggressive acts than when they were the same size or larger than the intruder; this trend persisted across three putative populations in Lake Xiloa, Nicaragua. A potential explanation for these findings is that the orange color functions as a signal of individual quality or breeding readiness and that breeding pairs increase aggression to repel intruders that pose the greatest threat to pair bond and nest maintenance.