DOGS share four of the five main personality traits that psychologists use to understand human behaviour, says a British researcher based in the US.

The findings by Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas promise to settle a question that may strike pet owners as odd, but which is controversial among scientists: whether animals can be said to have a meaningful personality at all.

Dr Gosling said: “The evidence that dogs have personality is as strong as the evidence that humans have.

“There’s a strong view that animal personality is preposterous anthropomorphism: when I suggested applying measures of human personality to animals, I had people yelling that I was bringing the field into disrepute.”

Human personality is measured according to five variables: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to new experience. Dr Gosling found that only conscientiousness — which measures trustworthiness, selfishness and dependability — was absent in dogs.

To investigate whether dog personalities were predictable, Dr Gosling interviewed owners about their pets’ temperaments, then tested whether the dogs would behave as predicted in particular circumstances.

Dogs’ “emotional stability”, for example, the equivalent of human neuroticism, was tested by asking an owner to leave her dog and walk away with another dog on the lead.

“If I’d known how much this would affect certain dogs, I might have found another way,” Dr Gosling said. “Some animals absolutely hated this, and this correlated well with the predictions.”

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