Jason Lefrandt and Dr. James Higley—Psychology
Introduction
During the internship at the University of California, Davis Primate Center this summer 2013, I have had the privilege of learning in various capacities as a research assistant. My main project that I was involved with was under Erna Tarara, a trained primatologist that did her field studies in Africa working on baboons. Together, we collect behavioral data that would help John Capitatio’s BioBehavioral Assessment (BBA) research on rhesus macaques.
John Capitatio has been working on his BioBehavioral assessment data for more than a decade now. He has received several hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth in grants and has been cited in many diverse topics including physiology, biology, and psychology which have been used in the medical, pharmacy, and education world. The work that I have been doing with Erna is a continuation of his BBA which furthers our education in medicine and psychology.
Methods
Through the period I was there, we rated and tracked the behavior of thirty adolescent male macaques. Each subject received two ten-minute focal animal observations per day for eight days. The observation days where consecutive except for holidays or weekends. There were two observation periods per day: early (8:00-10:30) and late (10:30-1:00). Animals received one observation during the early period and one observation during the late period per observation day. We watched animals from only one or two field cages during the eight day period.
We looked at each one individually for ten minutes and then recorded their behavior every thirty seconds. The way we assessed the macaque’s temperament and behavior was through a simple coding process: we wrote down whether the monkey was in proximity, grooming, playing, contact, or non-social every thirty seconds for ten minutes per monkey. The thirty monkeys were spread out over a three month period and we did approximately seven monkeys at a time for eight days for a more accurate assessment. At the end of the study, blood and CSF will be collected from the subjects.
Results
Although grant money for studies on apes and monkeys have been funneling more and more into the “hard” sciences (physiology, biology and neuroscience) rather than behavioral/psychology data, I believe John’s work in behavior, the work that I have been helping with contributes greatly in juxtapose with the “hard” sciences. For example, with the work we’ve been doing, we have found many animals to be shy/non-social vs. animals that are very sociable (groom many other animals). When we find their cortisol levels, neurotransmitter levels, etc. we can evaluate if there is a correlation between their behavior of non-sociable and social behavior and their cortisol and neurotransmitter levels. Based on previous studies, we would predict that those who were low sociable would have higher levels of cortisol and more acute and chronic stress. Our results showed a correlation between low sociability and high cortisol levels.
Discussion
There were many challenges with this study. One problem was accurately finding each and every monkey’s ID when they were interacting with our focal monkey. Sometimes we could not identify it because they didn’t have great dye markings or their tattoo was bad. This harmed the validity of the test because it is possible someone may have written down the wrong animal interacting with our focal. This harmed the reliability of the test because if we have many unidentified animals, we cannot accurately find who the subject’s friends or close family members are because they may be interacting with them but we just missed their ID. Another is the personality rating is done by Erna at the end of the eight day trial. She rates their personality on a scale of 1 to 7 which can be very arbitrary. Even she admitted that certain dye markings, injuries, size of the animal, or color of fur may affect her scoring. For example, she said that one monkey who had dye markings on his head made him look cuter, and therefore may have influenced her score to be higher for him on sociable.
Conclusion
I also had the opportunity to be a part of several other events including: collecting Titi urine, the necropsy of a rhesus macaque where we were taught the anatomy and functions of the macaque body, and “round-up” where I was trained to draw blood and inject a TB test through the eye-lid of dozens of rhesus macaques.
I am very thankful to BYU for the funding possible for me to see the science method/model practiced in action. I have learned so much about the basics in becoming a science practitioner, primatology, physiology, biology, and psychology. Thank you very much for this opportunity.