I have a new paper (with Alastair Wilson) out in the Behavioural Ecology journal, entitled ‘Avoiding the misuse of BLUP in behavioural ecology‘. Our paper is aimed at researchers working on individual variation in behaviour (e.g., personality, behavioural plasticity, behavioural syndromes), particularly those wishing to investigate associations between that behavioural variation and some other trait or variable (e.g., another behaviour, a physiological response, or even some external environmental variable). The thrust of the paper is really a call to ensure that we are using the proper statistical tools to test our hypotheses, rather than using other approaches that are known to give spurious results. The paper is quite brief, and can be found here (or drop me an email if you require a reprint).

Of course, pointing out problems is in itself not hugely useful without solutions being to hand, and so we have provided these in the form of tutorials for multivariate models in the programming language R. We are still working up more tutorials to cover more of the kinds of issues in which people are interested, so do keep checking back for updates – and let me know if there are any other relevant topics that you’d like to see covered! As has been pointed out on twitter, while we focused on animal behaviour because we work in that field, these models are applicable to many other fields in which researchers are interested in the causes and consequences of variation in labile traits.

NOTE

It has been pointed out to me (post-publication) that the Adriaenssens et al. (2016) paper in Physiology & Behavior, ‘Telomere length covaries with personality in a wild brown trout‘, did not use BLUPs extracted from mixed models in a secondary analysis, and is therefore incorrectly included in Table 1 of our Behavioural Ecology paper. I have apologised to Bart for my error, and contacted the publishers to see whether this reference can be removed from the paper.