Researchers of the University of Turku, Finland, have studied a
timber elephant population in Myanmar and discovered that Asian elephant
personality manifests through three different factors. The personality
factors identified by the researchers are Attentiveness, Sociability and
Aggressiveness.
As is commonly known, people have different personalities, and the
structure of human personality can be divided into five factors. Other
species' behaviour also differs between individuals: some are braver,
more social, or aggressive than others.
"These kinds of consistent differences in behaviour are called
personality. Personality studies on other species than humans have so
far focused on primates, pets and zoo populations, or on species that
have a relatively short lifespan. Besides humans, personality studies on
other long-lived species living in their natural habitat are rare,"
says Postdoctoral Researcher and the lead author of the study Martin
Seltmann from the Department of Biology at the University of Turku.
The researchers of the University of Turku studied a semi-captive
population of timber elephants in Myanmar and discovered that Asian
elephants have three different personality factors: Attentiveness,
Sociability and Aggressiveness. The researchers also identified that
male and female elephants do not differ in these three personality
factors.
"Attentiveness is related to how an elephant acts in and perceives
its environment. Sociability describes how an elephant seeks closeness
to other elephants and humans, and how popular they are as social
partners. Aggressiveness shows how aggressively an elephant acts towards
other elephants and how much it interferes in their social
interaction," describes Dr Seltmann.
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