| 1. |
- Leimar, Per, et al.
(author)
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Public opinion and alcohol policy in Sweden, 1990-2012
- 2013
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In: Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. - : SAGE Publications. - 1455-0725 .- 1458-6126. ; 30:6 2013, s. 473-490
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We analyse the association between public opinions and political decisions on alcohol policy in Sweden during the last decades. Methods Reviews of existing Swedish surveys on public opinion and recent data on the opinion of decision-makers. Results Restrictive alcohol policy measures have much support in Sweden and this support has increased in the last decade. The opinions of the public and their elected representatives correspond fairly well but the relation between these opinions and policy decisions are not always straightforward. Conclusions There is little support for the idea that public opinion has been a major influence on alcohol policy formation in the period of 1990–2012.
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| 2. |
- Zidar, Josefina, et al.
(author)
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A comparison of animal personality and coping styles in the red junglefowl
- 2017
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In: Animal Behaviour. - : Elsevier BV. - 0003-3472 .- 1095-8282. ; 130, s. 209-220
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- There is an increased focus in biology on consistent behavioural variation. Several terms are used to describe this variation, including animal personality and coping style. Both terms describe between individual consistency in behavioural variation; however, they differ in the behavioural assays typically used, the expected distribution of response variables, and whether they incorporate variation in behavioural flexibility. Despite these differences, the terms are often used interchangeably. We conducted experiments using juvenile and adult red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, as subjects to explore the degree to which animal personality and coping styles overlap. We demonstrate that animal personality and coping styles can be described in this species, and that shyer individuals had more flexible responses, as expected for coping styles. Behavioural responses from both personality and coping style assays had continuous distributions, and were not clearly separated into two types. Behavioural traits were not correlated and, hence, there was no evidence of a behavioural syndrome. Further, behavioural responses obtained in personality assays did not correlate with those from coping style tests. Animal personality and coping styles are therefore not synonymous in the red junglefowl. We suggest that the terms animal personality and coping style are not equivalent and should not be used interchangeably.
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| 3. |
- Zidar, Josefina, et al.
(author)
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The relationship between learning speed and personality is age- and task-dependent in red junglefowl
- 2018
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In: Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 0340-5443 .- 1432-0762. ; 72:10
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Cognition is fundamental to animals’ lives and an important source of phenotypic variation. Nevertheless, research on individual variation in animal cognition is still limited. Further, although individual cognitive abilities have been suggested to be linked to personality (i.e., consistent behavioral differences among individuals), few studies have linked performance across multiple cognitive tasks to personality traits. Thus, the interplays between cognition and personality are still unclear. We therefore investigated the relationships between an important aspect of cognition, learning, and personality, by exposing young and adult red junglefowl (Gallus gallus) to multiple learning tasks (discriminative, reversal, and spatial learning) and personality assays (novel arena, novel object, and tonic immobility). Learning speed was not correlated across learning tasks, and learning speed in discrimination and spatial learning tasks did not co-vary with personality. However, learning speed in reversal tasks was associated with individual variation in exploration, and in an age-dependent manner. More explorative chicks learned the reversal task faster than less explorative ones, while the opposite association was found for adult females (learning speed could not be assayed in adult males). In the same reversal tasks, we also observed a sex difference in learning speed of chicks, with females learning faster than males. Our results suggest that the relationship between cognition and personality is complex, as shown by its task- and age-dependence, and encourage further investigation of the causality and dynamics of this relationship.
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