ArticleHormones and behavior2017
Risk-averse personalities have a systemically potentiated neuroendocrine stress axis: A multilevel experiment in Parus major.
Article in Hormones and behavior, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Environmentally induced stress affects fitness of bold and shy alike: A long-term study of personality and feather corticosterone in Arctic-breeding kittiwakes.The Journal of animal ecology · 2026Article
- Same species, different risks: predation shapes hormonal profiles in a breeding sea duck, the common eider.Conservation physiology · 2026Article
- The relationship of coping style and social support variation to glucocorticoid metabolites in wild olive baboons (Papio anubis).Primates; journal of primatology · 2025Article
- The response to stressors in adulthood depends on the interaction between prenatal exposure to glucocorticoids and environmental context.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Quantifying Glucocorticoid Plasticity Using Reaction Norm Approaches: There Still is So Much to Discover!Integrative and comparative biology · 2022Review
- Are behaviour and stress-related phenotypes in urban birds adaptive?The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Transcriptomic and Network Analyses Reveal Immune Modulation by Endocannabinoids in Approach/Avoidance Traits.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- The ontogeny of personality: Repeatability of social and escape behaviors across developmental stages in Siberian hamsters (Phodopus sungorus).Journal of experimental zoology. Part A, Ecological and integrative physiology · 2021Article
- Hormone-mediated foraging strategies in an uncertain environment: Insights into the at-sea behavior of a marine predator.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Animal Personality and Conservation: Basics for Inspiring New Research.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Review
- Divergent immune responses in behaviorally-inhibited vs. non-inhibited male rats.Physiology & behavior · 2020Article
- Baseline and stress-induced corticosterone levels are heritable and genetically correlated in a barn owl population.Heredity · 2019Article
- Differences in stress reactivity between zebrafish with alternative stress coping styles.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Host defences against avian brood parasitism: an endocrine perspective.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Review
- Social information changes stress hormone receptor expression in the songbird brain.Hormones and behavior · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Hormonal pleiotropy-the simultaneous influence of a single hormone on multiple traits-has been hypothesized as an important mechanism underlying personality, and circulating glucocorticoids are central to this idea. A major gap in our understanding is the neural basis for this link. Here we examine the stability and structure of behavioral, endocrine and neuroendocrine traits in a population of songbirds (Parus major). Upon identifying stable and covarying behavioral and endocrine traits, we test the hypothesis that risk-averse personalities exhibit a neuroendocrine stress axis that is systemically potentiated-characterized by stronger glucocorticoid reactivity and weaker negative feedback. We show high among-individual variation and covariation (i.e. personality) in risk-taking behaviors and demonstrate that four aspects of glucocorticoid physiology (baseline, stress response, negative feedback strength and adrenal sensitivity) are also repeatable and covary. Further, we establish that high expression of mineralocorticoid and low expression of glucocorticoid receptor in the brain are linked with systemically elevated plasma glucocorticoid levels and more risk-averse personalities. Our findings support the hypothesis that steroid hormones can exert pleiotropic effects that organize behavioral phenotypes and provide novel evidence that neuroendocrine factors robustly explain a large fraction of endocrine and personality variation.
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