Svartberg and Forkman were also able to document Panksepp’s PLAY system with their Playfulness factor and the RAGE/Anger system with their Aggressiveness factor. They also described their Curiosity/Fearlessness factor as an “analogue to fearfulness, but inverted” (Svartberg & Forkman, 2002, p. 152) and compared it to the general fearfulness observed in other studies, which suggests their Curiosity/Fearlessness factor may be related to Panksepp’s FEAR system.
Each of the behavior ratings on the Sociability factor involved initiating physical contact with a stranger along a continuum that included “intense greeting with whining and jumping” (Svartberg & Forkman, 2002, p. 137) at the high end. These social eagerness behaviors were precisely what Davis observed when opioid blockers were administered to dogs, likely activating their PANIC/Sadness systems. Morphine, an opioid, administered to dogs had the opposite effects and basically stopped dogs from initiating social contacts with a human handler or with other dogs (Davis, 1980). Thus, Svartberg and Forkman’s Sociability factor seems to fit with Scott and Fuller’s (1965) distress vocalization and attachment observations and later demonstrations in Scott’s BGSU dog lab that the brain opioids regulate (alleviate) separation distress (Panksepp et al., 1978), which further aligns Sociability with Panksepp’s PANIC/Sadness system (Panksepp, 1982, 1998a).
Altogether, Svartberg and Forkman found all of the primary personality emotions in their analysis of the DMA except for the CARE system, which like in Scott and Fuller’s work was not empirically evaluated as a general temperament dimension. Using rather different methods, adult dogs from forty-seven breeds tested individually in single sessions, and relying on factor analysis, Svartberg and Forkman (2002) added further confirmation of the set of affective neuroscience dimensions that account for a substantial part of the foundation of the mammalian personality factors.
Taking a behavior genetics approach, Saetre et al. (2006), who graciously acknowledged Scott and Fuller as the pioneers of behavior genetic research on personality in dogs, used the large Swedish database of DMA behavior ratings to analyze the pedigrees of 5,964 German shepherds and 4,589 Rottweilers by integrating the DMA data with pedigrees on untested relatives back to grandparents. However, Saetre and colleagues incorporated data from an older, shorter version of the DMA and had complete data on only sixteen behavior observations that only included a single measure of Sociability, which they removed from their analysis. Using the same first-order factors previously identified by Svartberg and Forkman (excepting Sociability), the pedigree relationships and the first-order traits explained 46 percent and 39 percent of the observed genetic correlations for German shepherds and Rottweilers respectively, which supported a genetic basis for canine temperament.
C-BARQ: A Questionnaire for Dog Owners to Rate Their Pets
In dog studies, the behavioral test battery seems to have been historically more popular to identify breed as well as individual personality differences. However, trait ratings by informants—people that know the target individual well—is another method for measuring personality traits, and there is substantial evidence that in humans this approach to collecting personality data can be at least as accurate as when individuals complete the personality questionnaire themselves (Connelly & Ones, 2011).
Accordingly, Hsu and Serpell (2003) have offered a dog-rating questionnaire with sixty-eight items that dog owners can complete on their pets. The instrument was originally named the Pennsylvania Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire, because the authors were at the University of Pennsylvania. However, it was later renamed the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ). The C-BARQ measures eleven factor-analytically derived dog temperament scales, which generally overlapped with the scales Svartberg and Forkman derived from the Swedish DMA. However, the C-BARQ scales included multiple measures of RAGE/Anger ( “stranger-directed aggression” and “owner-directed aggression”) and FEAR (“stranger-directed fear” and “nonsocial fear”), and a scale that combined elements of aggression and fear (“dog-directed fear or aggression”). The C-BARQ also provided three measures (“separation-directed behavior,” “attachment or attention-seeking behavior,” and a “trainability” scale that included items like “returns immediately when called while off leash” and “will attempt to fetch sticks, balls, and other objects”), all of which link to social contact and the primary PANIC/Sadness system that is so prominent in the study of mammalian temperaments. Further, a C-BARQ “chasing” factor was described as measuring “a tendency to engage in predatory pursuit,” supporting the Svartman and Fortman chase factor and predatory behavior as a specific expression of the SEEKING dimension in canine personalities. The C-BARQ also has an “excitability” scale, which measures excited overreaction prior to events like “just before being taken for a walk,” which seems like an anticipatory SEEKING response. The C-BARQ also has a scale for “pain sensitivity,” which would have little to do with personality but is probably more relevant for overall veterinary care. Other than C-BARQ not having a scale for the PLAY system, the C-BARQ and Svartberg and Forkman’s DMA analysis are remarkably comparable despite using very different methods.
Taking a page directly from McDougall’s work, Hsu and Serpell (2003) also validated their questionnaire scales by comparing clinical diagnoses from the Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania on two hundred dogs having clear behavior problems with the dog’s C-BARQ questionnaire scores. They grouped the diagnoses into seven clusters corresponding to their first seven factor scales. Correlations between the diagnoses and questionnaire factor scores showed that particular behavior problems had the highest correlation with the corresponding questionnaire factor, strongly substantiating all three of the negative primary emotions in canine clinical work. Thus, the C-BARQ and its clinical validation confirms McDougall’s principle that, in their extreme expressions, emotional personality traits can become pathological (see Chapter 4) and strongly supports the need for separate distinct scales for each of the primary negative emotions—RAGE/Anger, FEAR, and PANIC/Sadness—in mammalian personality. A future suggestion could be to add scales targeting more canine PLAYful and CAREing behaviors to broaden the C-BARQ’s coverage of the primary-process positive affective temperamental domains.
Military Working Dogs
Studies of working dogs are less concerned with personality as a whole and more focused on trying to solve a very practical problem: identifying dogs that are likely to succeed in their specialty roles. That is, these behavioral tests are designed to predict narrow aptitudes for specific canine work rather than a broad set of personality dimensions. For example, Sam Gosling and colleagues (Sinn, Gosling, & Hilliard, 2010) studied military working dogs at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio, Texas. They analyzed standardized behavioral tests collected prior to training in which observers rated a dog’s reactions to exercises the military had designed to measure a dog’s aptitude for patrol and detection work.
A factor analysis of twelve observer ratings yielded four factors. The authors labeled the first and largest factor “Object focus,” which measured interest in chasing and playing with a rubber toy that included excited barking, pouncing, throwing, and chewing; general interest in the environment and avoiding potentially fearful distractions; and generally exhibiting no fear. This factor could be measuring predatory behavior with a playful tone in that the dog is excited and vocal rather than quiet. Lack of fear is relevant because it is very clear that fear inhibits play, an effect that has been well studied formally in juvenile rat models.
By contrast to the “vigorous vocalizations” (Sinn et al., 2010, p. 54) observed in the first factor, the second factor, Sharpness, had the highest test loadings on the dog’s tendency to bite the tester’s harm-protected sleeve “strongly, calmly, and quietly” (p. 55), which is strikingly similar to the quiet predatory biting elicited using electric brain stimulation in cats (Flynn, 1976; Siegel, 2004) and rats (Panksepp, 1971), a behavioral tendency that has
been shown to require activation of the SEEKING system.
The third factor, Human focus, primarily measured the dog’s tendency to direct aggressiveness toward the human tester with barking, snarling, tooth exposure, and piloerection, which would seem to be a direct measure of agonistic attack and Panksepp’s (1998a) RAGE/Anger system. The fourth and smallest factor, Search focus, was isolated to search activity tests that may reflect Panksepp’s (1998a) dopaminergic SEEKING system.
As the evolutionarily most ancient of the primary emotions, the SEEKING system has widespread influence on the widest variety of behaviors, including exploration and general activity, as well as LUST, CARE and PLAY. It is tempting to speculate that in addition to SEEKING-oriented predatory behavior, these dogs exhibited a curiosity toward the environment that military, police, and hunters take advantage of in search work. It is also relevant that these dogs seem to find the search itself rewarding, because they never get to keep the objects of their search, including the quarry they help the hunters take home. In all cases studied, the activation of the SEEKING system is a strongly positive experience and a potent reward, which relates to all primary emotions having either a subjectively experienced reward or an escape from punishing qualities.
Altogether, the Sinn et al. (2010) factor analysis included a narrower range of temperament traits focusing on what we could call the RAGE/Anger system, as well as multiple elaborations of the SEEKING system. They may also have thus distinguished playful as well the as the serious predatory behavior systems. The common link may be that the quiet predatory attack evoked by brain stimulation requires electrodes to be placed along the dopamine investigatory SEEKING circuits in the brain but with a recognition that the PLAY system (which is heavily represented in the thalamus, as opposed to just the hypothalamus; see Siviy & Panksepp, 1985) also requires substantial brain dopamine activation along the medial forebrain bundle (Panksepp, 1998a), as has been most clearly demonstrated in more recent studies with rat “laughter” (Burgdorf, Wood, Kroes, Moskal, & Panksepp, 2007; Burgdorf et al., 2008). In any case, the predatory behavior in the Sharpness scale, along with the previously described chasing factors reported in the DMA and C-BARQ studies, strongly reinforces predatory behavior as a general temperament trait in dogs.
Pet Adoption: The Need for Low RAGE/Anger
In a very practical example of a test battery, Kelly Bollen and Joseph Horowitz (2008) explored testing the suitability of shelter dogs for future adoption. They used Sue Sternberg’s “Assess-a-Pet” test (Sternberg, 2002, cited in Bollen & Horowitz, 2008), which measured dogs’ responses to nine common household situations, such as a human reaching into the food bowl while a dog is eating, a human taking a valued possession from a dog, and a dog meeting a human stranger. The goal was to increase the percentage of successful home placements by not placing dogs for adoption that exhibited an aggressive personality, such as lunging at the evaluator while growling and snarling, or making any attempt to bite during the tests.
Using this screening test, the shelter increased its rate of successful dog adoptions, with 3.5 percent of dogs being returned for exhibiting aggression compared to 5.1 percent the previous year, which validated Bollen and Horowitz’s work. Importantly, the return rate could have been improved further by not placing “borderline” cases that during the shelter test displayed only mild aggression, such as stiffening or slight growling, because there was a significant trend for these dogs to be returned for displaying aggressive behavior in the home as well.
However, there is another basic personality question: Were there stable differences in aggressive personality tendencies in the dogs they studied? Indeed, 90 percent of the 217 dogs initially brought to the shelter because they were aggressive in their previous homes also displayed aggression during at least one of the test components evaluated in the shelter, which was almost twelve times the failure rate of dogs brought to the shelter for other reasons and highly significantly different. So, a stable aggressive personality trait was confirmed in these dogs across the two completely different settings, in the dog’s previous home and at the shelter. Furthermore, the “borderline” dogs placed for adoption were more likely to be returned to the shelter than dogs exhibiting no aggression during the shelter test, demonstrating consistent aggressiveness across a third different setting. In short, Bollen and Horowitz provided evidence that a behavioral assessment could identify dogs exhibiting easily provoked RAGE/Anger that made it difficult for families to keep them as pets.
SOCIALIZATION AND DOMESTICATION
Human Social Attachment Measures Adapted to Dogs
Social bonding has long been a subject of interest in psychology (Bowlby, 1960; Scott, 1962). In a study specifically focused on canine social attachment, Topal, Miklosi, Csanyi, and Doka (1998), working in Hungary, adapted the Ainsworth Strange Situation Test, originally used to examine attachment behavior in children (Ainsworth, 1969). The original test revealed “secure” and “insecure” social attachment styles in children by observing their reactions in a strange setting to being separated from and then reunited with their mothers, as well as interacting with a stranger. Topal and colleagues were interested in studying these attachment styles between dogs (as the child) and their human owners (as the parent). Like Mary Ainsworth, they set up a series of tests that placed each dog in a strange place with its owner, with a stranger, or alone.
In their attempt to replicate Ainsworth’s attachment types in dogs, Topal et al. (1998) identified three factors: anxiety (separation distress), acceptance of stranger, and attachment to owner. They reported that some of the pet dogs clearly explored the unfamiliar room and exhibited increased play and did so significantly more with their owner present than with the stranger. This pattern was consistent with the Ainsworth (1969) secure attachment phenotype, which similarly found young children showing signs of missing the parent, but then greeting the parent upon reunion, and the child then resuming his or her activities without further interruption. Further, Topal and colleagues reported that the dogs in their study could be placed on a continuum of how securely they seemed to be attached to their owners.
However, Topal’s group did not report finding dogs that matched Ainsworth’s (1969) insecure attachment types, characterized by either showing extreme signs of distress when the parent left and remaining inconsolable upon the parent’s return or showing little if any sign of missing the parent and avoiding and ignoring the parent when the parent reentered the test room. The Topal group did identify a cluster of five out of their fifty-one dogs exhibiting high separation anxiety, high attachment to the owner, but also with high acceptance of the stranger. That is, these dogs were eager to make contact with any human who was with them in the strange room. This type of social need did not appear in the Ainsworth studies, especially with the insecure children who were not consoled by strangers (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970).
In contrast to the Ainsworth findings, all of the dog’s exhibiting high levels of separation anxiety when left alone in the strange room readily made contact when any human returned to the test room. Even though all of these dogs were raised in families, and Topal and colleagues argued these human-dog relationships were like the parent-child relationship, none of the dogs in the Topal study behaved like the Ainsworth insecure or insecure-avoidant types in that they all exhibited separation distress when left alone but all made contact with any human during the reunion episodes of the experiment. This pattern of data may suggest that the insecure types reflect a secondary-process personality dimension, arising from past learning-socialization experiences, rather than a primary emotional one.
Obviously, specific social attachments reflect learned secondary-process associative-learning mechanisms, with the learning of security most likely based on the primary-process PANIC/Sadness system, as well as the social reward systems of CARE and PLAY. Mammals are not born socially bonded, as was dramatically illustrated in the Scott and Fuller work in which puppies with no human contact for fourteen weeks
essentially became wild animals that totally avoided humans (Freedman et al., 1961). However, in their work on the critical periods of socialization, Scott and Fuller (1965) also reported that as little as two weeks of contact with humans between four and eight weeks of age were sufficient to socialize puppies to humans. Thus, perhaps not surprisingly, Topal’s group did not find pet dogs that were socially avoidant.
It is tempting to speculate that domesticated dogs have such sensitive PANIC/Sadness systems that they become socialized with even minimal contact with humans. Even though dogs and humans remain dependent on their families for many years, some human children may have sufficiently insensitive PANIC/Sadness systems that they never become securely bonded to their families, especially when surrounded by parental strife that amounts to chaos in family dynamics. As Ainsworth observed, such a child might not show separation distress when left alone and might by choice remain socially isolated when the mother returned. It is also possible that autistic children are deficient in such basic social-emotional sensitivities (Panksepp & Sahley, 1987), an understanding that may lead to novel therapeutics (Moskal, Burgdorf, Kroes, Brudzynski, & Panksepp, 2011).
Palmer & Custance (2008) added additional experimental controls and still confirmed that dog owners provided a secure base for their dogs, showing that dogs were most willing to engage in play with the owner but also more likely to play with the stranger when their owner was present than when their owner was absent. A variation on these studies by an Italian group (Mariti, Carlone, Ricci, Sighieri, & Gazzano, 2014) used Ainsworth’s secure attachment paradigm to test the attachment between two dogs. They used twenty-two pairs of dogs living in the same household. One member of each dog pair was arbitrarily used as the subject and the other dog was assigned the role of the primary attachment figure, rather than using the dog’s owner. A human unknown to any of the dogs was used as the stranger. Remarkably, after being left alone in the room, the dog being studied was more consoled by and made more contact with the human stranger than with the other dog that shared the same household with them, suggesting that dogs may have been genetically selected to form strong social bonds with humans (Serpell, 1995), or simply have a history of finding active comforting from humans rather than other dogs.
The Emotional Foundations of Personality Page 17