Nov. 15, 2005 — They might be your best friends, but just what makes Fido and Fifi tick is far from well understood, said researchers who have surveyed seven decades of dog personality studies.

Despite a surge in canine temperament studies since the 1960s, there are some large holes in the research, said University of Texas at Austin psychologists who are hoping to fill some of the voids.

For instance, the vast majority of dog studies have been on young German shepherds and Labrador retrievers.

As a result, practically nothing is scientifically known about the personality differences of pit bulls and poodles, or even whether personality traits are truly breed-specific.

"There aren't tried and true assessments of dog temperaments," said psychologist Amanda Jones.

Jones and her colleague Samuel Gosling evaluated 51 canine studies from the 1930s to the present. Their results are published in the November issue of Applied Animal Behavior Science.

The biases in past studies reflect the many reasons people are interested in learning about dog personalities, Jones explained.

Dogs that have been most assessed for personality traits in the past were typically being screened for their potential as guide dogs or police dogs, hence all the German shepherds and Labradors.

It also explains why a lot of studies focused on young dogs to see if it's really possible to predict how an adult dog will perform by how it acts as a puppy.

More recently, interest in scientific assessments of dog temperaments has expanded among animal shelter workers, dog breeders, dog owners and veterinarians, said Jones.

"They want to do a better job of matching owners to pets," Jones said of shelter workers and dog owners in particular.

Experienced shelter handlers agree.

"The reason we are interested in personality in pet dogs in shelters is we want to find out which dogs can be re-homed and not re-homed," said pet behavior expert Rebecca Ledger of the British Columbia SPCA. "You can't re-home an aggressive dog."

To begin to get a handle on what has been discovered in all the 51 studies, Jones and Gosling extracted 623 personality trait descriptions and had independent animal behavior specialists sort them on index cards into different categories.

They came up with seven basic dog personality traits, said Jones. The seven traits are Reactivity, Fearfulness, Activity, Sociability, Responsiveness to training, Submissiveness and Aggression.

These seven may be reduced to five or fewer as researchers look at them to see which might be just subtle variations on a theme, said Jones. That, after all, is the point of the review, Jones said: to find out what they should study next.

"Basically it's just a starting point for this area of research for my lab," Jones said.