
Bold personality makes domestic dogs in a shelter less vulnerable to disease - fern12
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0193794
======
ThrustVectoring
I feel like the causality is likely backwards from the title - if you are less
vulnerable to disease, you can better afford to boldly take risks and explore
new situations and withstand the possible negative consequences.

~~~
dmos62
That would presuppose that the dog knows that he has a fit immune system,
which we couldn't really explain either. I think the causality relationship is
less interesting than that there's a correlation between different aspects of
interaction with the environment. Maybe the causality works both ways even?

~~~
trhway
>That would presuppose that the dog knows that he has a fit immune system,
which we couldn't really explain either.

feeling well is a pretty good proxy for a well working immune system, and it
doesn't require any knowledge about immune system.

------
sghi
So this is the research area that I currently work in, albeit with a disease
ecology perspective rather than a biochemistry one. I've had a quick read of
it and and although it does seem to track other research that has been done
("Why are behavioral and immune traits linked?" by Lopes 2017 is a nice
review) I'd love to see some power analyses - the sample size seems pretty
small for something as complex as this question. The study I'm helping with
now has a minimum sample size in the hundreds, for instance, for a broadly
similar question. PCA-ing a few tests together is pretty common, but also
comes with a lot of potential biases (see "Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in
behavioural ecology" by Houslay and Wilson if anyone is interested!)

------
no-brainer
tl:dr; healthier dogs seem happier...

