Dear BERGers, 

 

This is a quick reminder that this Wednesday (11 May), Dr Alexander Weiss (University of Edinburgh) will be giving a seminar about his new paper entitled "Dominance in Human Personality Space and in Hominoid Phylogeny". Please see the abstract below. I am also attaching the accepted paper that Alex has kindly shared with us.


Link to the meeting and a list of the forthcoming seminars are below this email.


Hope to see you on Wednesday!


Abstract: 

Unlike nonhuman primates, individual differences between humans in dominance do not appear as broad personality factors. This may be attributable to differences between the questionnaires used to study human and nonhuman primate personality. Alternatively, this may reflect a difference in the organization of personality in humans and nonhuman primates. To determine which of these two possibilities was most likely 1147 participants were asked to rate their personality and/or that of somebody else on the Hominoid Personality Questionnaire (HPQ), which has been used to study nonhuman primate personality. A large subset of these participants (~80%) also completed self- and/or rater reports of one of three questionnaires used to measure human personality. Exploratory factor analyses of HPQ rater report data yielded five factors. These factors correlated mostly in expected ways with scales from questionnaires used to study human personality. Exploratory factor analyses of HPQ self-report data yielded no clear number of factors and no consistent evidence with respect to the presence of a dominance factor. Subsequent analyses compared HPQ scales that represented dominance factors in chimpanzees, bonobos, mountain gorillas, and orangutans, to scales derived from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, including Fearless Dominance, which combined Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Extraversion facets, Emotional Stability (the inverse of Neuroticism), and Extraversion’s Assertiveness facet. Fearless Dominance was most like the great ape dominance factors. The absence of human dominance factors, therefore, appears to reflect present or past social conditions of our species. 

Date Time Speaker Affiliation Seminar title
11/05/2022 16:00 Alexander Weiss University of Edinburgh Dominance in Human Personality Space and in Hominoid Phylogeny
18/05/2022 16:00 Eva Reindl Durham University TBC, investigating executive functions in children and chimps
25/05/2022 16:00 Shelley Culpepper University of Stirling Interspecific Olfactory Perception of Human Emotions: From the Horses Perspective



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