BY DAVID AGUS
ROLE MODELS
OVER THE PAST SEVERAL DECADES, THERE HAVE BEEN many supporting studies of the health-promoting effects of an optimistic personality. Newer research demonstrates that high levels of hope have been found to be related to lower levels of pain, psychological distress, and functional disability in patients with chronic illnesses.
This is not to say there’s no value in grief and feeling glum. Forced optimism can backfire when too much inauthentic positivity leads to denialism and hiding dark emotions that demand we process them. But the two do interact to help determine your overall personality and approach to life in response to positive or negative events. Unsurprisingly, this is also true for other members of the animal kingdom, particularly for pigs and squirrels.
In fact, the domestic pig is an interesting animal to study and compare with humans in terms of the way it processes happiness and pain. Pigs are among a growing list of research subjects in the relatively young scientific field of animal personality. They share a number of cognitive capacities with humans, such as self-awareness, experiencing emotions, and playfulness. Studies on the domestic pig tell us that mood and personality interact to influence thinking and how our biases come into play within our environment. And therein lies a key word: environment. It turns out that environment can make or break our moods (and those of pigs).
In pigs, personality is frequently measured by watching how the animals cope under different circumstances. Pigs that are deemed proactive, characterized by more active and consistent behavior, are not the same as reactive pigs that behave more passively and erratically. According to one illuminating 2016 study by researchers in the U.K., reactive pigs living in a feel-good environment (like a roomier, straw-filled pen) were much more likely to be optimistic if they were given an obstacle to deal with that wasn’t routine, like a feeding bowl with an unknown ingredient inside. Proactive pigs, in contrast, were likely to respond optimistically in such situations even if they lived in a smaller, more barren environment. In studies on humans, proactivity and reactivity have been linked to extroversion and neuroticism, respectively, with extroverts more optimistic and those with neurotic tendenc
