Do reproduction and parenting influence personality traits? Insights from threespine stickleback.

ABSTRACT: Although one of the hallmarks of personality traits is their consistency over time, we might expect personality traits to change during life history shifts. Becoming a parent is a major life history event, when individuals undergo dramatic behavioural and physiological changes. Here we employ a longitudinal experiment to ask whether personality changes in response to the experience of parenting in male threespine sticklebacks, Gasterosteus aculeatus. Life history theory predicts that males should be less risk averse after successfully parenting, and the neuroendocrinology of parenting suggests that parenting could reorganize the hormonal landscape and behaviour of fathers. We randomly assigned males to either an experimental group (reproduced and parented) or a control group (did no

SUBMITTER: Stein LR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4778261 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature