The non-human perspective on the neurobiology of temperament, personality, and psychopathology: what's next?

Fundamental neurobiological processes are usually evolutionarily conserved and most easily studied in animals. There is a move to seeing psychopathology as an extreme position in a multidimensional trait spectrum, and even zebrafish provide useful models of psychopathology. Animal breeding, pharmacology, and neural models of states provide a basis for understanding traits in all animals, including humans — particularly if we view traits as relatively unchanging sensitivities of neural systems that generate myriad momentary states, matching density state-trait distributions in human personality psychology. We see a major development in ‘What’s next?’ as the recent combination of virtual world models with fMRI and scalp EEG brain recordings in humans. Once fully translated, such human work can raise questions that require further animal work. The future needs both more animal work and more, synergistic, translational human work if we are to uncover the neurobiology of personality and its role in psychopathology