Highlights•Animal personality traits tend to be stable within life stages but not across.•
Metamorphosis and/or sexual maturation are important for personality development.• …

Recent studies of animal personality have focused on its proximate causation and its
ecological and evolutionary significance, but have mostly ignored questions about its …

Interest has been growing among behavioral biologists in individual differences in animal
behavior of the kind that can be considered to reflect differences in personality. Once …

The discovery that an individual may be constrained, and even behave sub‐optimally,
because of its personality type has fundamental implications for understanding individual‐to …

During the last few years individual differences in nonhuman animal (hereafter “animal”)
behavior have been a subject of rapidly growing research interest (reviews in Réale et al …

Developmental processes can have major impacts on the correlations in behaviour across
contexts (contextual generality) and across time (temporal consistency) that are the …

Highlights•We examine the development of personality across two different ontogenetic
stages.•We manipulate the early environment to create differences in personality …

Individuals of the same sex or age within a given species often differ from each other in their
behaviour and underlying physiology, even under stan-dardized conditions. Most of this …

Whether animal personality studies provide insights of broader evolutionary and ecological
relevance to the field of behavioural ecology is frequently questioned. One of the sources of …

There is now compelling evidence that personality traits can be assessed in nonhuman
animals (Gosling & Vazire, 2002; Vazire, Gosling, Dickey, & Schapiro, 2007), opening the …