The sub-field of comparative psychology has ebbed and flowed since the establishment of the field of psychology. Today, comparative psychology is taught rarely as an elective, much less as a required course within psychology departments around the United States. Based on responses on a beginning of semester reflection assignment about the field of psychology, when first or second year undergraduate students are asked about their knowledge of psychology and the various fields within, most have never heard of comparative psychology. Those that have heard of comparative psychology from a high school course, the students rarely mention it freely. The purpose of this essay is to share the reflections of students who have completed an upper division elective comparative psychology course at a primarily undergraduate, Hispanic-serving institution. In this course, the students were asked to reflect on what they know about comparative psychology at the beginning of the course and to return to those early reflections at the end of the course. One major finding is that the majority of the students state that this course should be a required course or a capstone for psychology as it integrates all of their required coursework together into a common experience. This synthesis enabled the students to see the importance of comparative analysis and the role understanding animals plays in understanding humans. Comparative psychology should not simply be a historical facet of the field of psychology, but should continue to play a critical role in shaping the experiences of students of psychology. Whether it is simply to make students of psychology aware of the role animal research has in understanding almost all aspects of psychology (clinical, learning, health, development, personality, social, biopsychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, cognition) or to highlight the need that investigating the same question in different subjects is valuable, comparative psychology has a vital role in our field today.

On 14 April 2016, the scientific community lost Dr. Stan Kuczaj, professor at the University of Southern Mississippi and Director of the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory. He was a beloved teacher, researcher, friend, mentor, and colleague. By age 65, this well-liked, respected professor had achieved world-renowned status in multiple disciplines—comparative psychology, behavioral sciences, and developmental psychology. His tremendous success in these areas resulted in a legacy of more than 50 master’s- and doctoral-level students working in a variety of fields; he also had hundreds of collaborators from around the world. Stan significantly contributed to and influenced the current direction of these fields and had many plans and research projects still to accomplish.

To navigate through a social world, animals may form temporary or long-term associations with others, recognize kin and discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar conspecifics, protect themselves and their resources, fight and compete for the best mates, and produce offspring that require various forms of care.  The purpose of the current paper was to summarize the publication trends of research investigating animal social interactions over the last 20 years. We selected 8 journals for their diverse representation of animal taxa and examined the number of published articles representing research on affiliative, agonistic, and sexual social interactions.  Out of 18,993 published articles, social interactions ( N = 4,273) were studied 5.5% to 30.8% of the published articles per journal between 1993-2013.  Agonistic social interactions (43%) were the most frequently published topic with affiliative social interactions representing less than a third (30%) of the articles and sexual social interactions accounting for the remaining articles (27%).  Mammalian social interactions were investigated the most (38.5%) with invertebrate (22%) and avian (21%) social interactions following closely behind.  Observational research and experimental research designs were divided almost equally across different social interactions except for affiliative interactions.  Social interactions were studied most often in laboratory settings (45%), then semi-natural field settings (32.5%), and less often in natural habitats (19%).  Interestingly, the rates of the different types of social interactions, certain taxa, type of research study, and research setting remained relatively consistent across the 20 year period.  Some fluctuations occurred in the frequency of specific topics and taxa within various years; however, research on mate choice, parental care, environmental influences, and group composition was consistently conducted across the years.  While many aspects of social interactions in a broad range of taxa have been studied, there are many areas that are still sparse and in need of additional research.