scholarly journals Social bonding, gestural complexity and displacement behaviour of wild chimpanzee

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Ilona Roberts ◽  
Sam George Bradley Roberts

AbstractKinship and demography affect social affiliation in many different contexts such as co-feeding, resting, travel, grooming, visual attention and proximity. Chimpanzees may coordinate these social interactions by using gestural communication to make signaller’s goal transparent to the recipient and also by increasing commitment of the recipient through including rewarding property in communication. The rewards of gesturing can be measured through the rates of displacement behaviour made in response to these gestures by the recipient. We tested hypothesis that gestural communication affects social affiliation after controlling for kinship and demography in wild, adult chimpanzees living in Budongo Forest, Uganda. We found that affiliative but not antagonistic gestures positively predicted social affiliation. Contexts differed in their association with gestures according to complexity and association with displacement behaviour. More complex, less intense gestures predicted mutual grooming, travel, visual attention whereas less complex, more intense gestures predicted unidirectional grooming. Mirroring these patterns, reduced displacement activity occurred in response to gestures associated with unidirectional grooming but not other contexts. We highlight that these tactical decisions that wild chimpanzees make in their use of gestural communication may be driven by complexity of social environment that influences effectiveness with which signalers can influence the recipient.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Ilona Roberts ◽  
Sam George Bradley Roberts

AbstractA key challenge for primates is coordinating behavior with conspecifics in large, complex social groups. Gestures play a key role in this process and chimpanzees show considerable flexibility communicating through single gestures, sequences of gestures interspersed with periods of response waiting (persistence) and rapid sequences where gestures are made in quick succession, too rapid for the response waiting to have occurred. Previous studies examined behavioral reactions to single gestures and sequences, but whether this complexity is associated with more complex sociality at the level of the dyad partner and the group as a whole is not well understood. We used social network analysis to examine how the production of single gestures and sequences of gestures was related to the duration of time spent in proximity and individual differences in proximity in wild East African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii). Pairs of chimpanzees that spent a longer duration of time in proximity had higher rates of persistence, but not a higher rate of single gesture or rapid sequences. Central individuals in the social network received higher rates of persistence, but not rapid sequence or single gesture. Intentional gestural communication plays an important role in regulating social interactions in complex primate societies.


Behaviour ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 138 (5) ◽  
pp. 649-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Arnold ◽  
Andrew Whiten

AbstractSince de Waal & van Roosmalen (1979) first documented the occurrence of reconciliation between former opponents in captive chimpanzees, the study of the post-conflict behaviour of primates has provided valuable information about some of the details of primate social organisation. The vast majority of these studies have been carried out on captive subjects and it has been assumed that these findings are representative of wild primates. We set out to investigate whether this was true for the Sonso community of wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of the Budongo Forest, Uganda, using controlled procedures comparable with those used in captive studies. We found that these chimpanzees were much less likely to reconcile than their captive counterparts. Only one dimension of relationship quality had an effect on the likelihood of reconciliation. Individuals which were highly compatible, in terms of time spent affiliating, reconciled conflicts more often than those with weak relationships. Captive chimpanzees have also been shown to 'console' one another (de Waal & van Roosmalen, 1979; de Waal & Aureli, 1996), where uninvolved bystanders initiate affiliative contacts with victims of aggression. This study did not confirm that consolatory behaviour was characteristic of wild chimpanzee post-conflict behaviour. Nor did these chimpanzees use explicit gestures during post-conflict interactions as they have been shown to do in two out of three captive studies. We conclude that the post-conflict behaviour of chimpanzees is more variable than has previously been thought and is likely to be dependent on the prevailing social environment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benedikt Holtmann ◽  
Julia Buskas ◽  
Matthew Steele ◽  
Kristaps Solokovskis ◽  
Jochen B. W. Wolf

Abstract Cooperation is a prevailing feature of many animal systems. Coalitionary aggression, where a group of individuals engages in coordinated behaviour to the detriment of conspecific targets, is a form of cooperation involving complex social interactions. To date, evidence has been dominated by studies in humans and other primates with a clear bias towards studies of male-male coalitions. We here characterize coalitionary aggression behaviour in a group of female carrion crows consisting of recruitment, coordinated chase, and attack. The individual of highest social rank liaised with the second most dominant individual to engage in coordinated chase and attack of a lower ranked crow on several occasions. Despite active intervention by the third most highly ranked individual opposing the offenders, the attack finally resulted in the death of the victim. All individuals were unrelated, of the same sex, and naïve to the behaviour excluding kinship, reproduction, and social learning as possible drivers. Instead, the coalition may reflect a strategy of the dominant individual to secure long-term social benefits. Overall, the study provides evidence that members of the crow family engage in coordinated alliances directed against conspecifics as a possible means to manipulate their social environment.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Snow

The lessons I have learned over the last many years seem always to come in pairs – a lesson about the findings that brings with it a lesson about life as a researcher...Lesson 1. Even as a doctoral student, I believed that the sorts of social interactions young children had with adults supported language acquisition. In 1971, when I completed my dissertation, that was a minority view, and one ridiculed by many. I was, unfortunately, deflected from a full-on commitment to research on the relationship between social environment and language development for many years by the general atmosphere of disdain for such claims. In the intervening years, of course, evidence to support the claim has accumulated, and now it is generally acknowledged that a large part of the variance among children in language skills can be explained by their language environments. This consensus might have been achieved earlier had I and others been braver about pursuing it.[Download the PDF and read more...]


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anubhuti Poudyal ◽  
Alastair van Heerden ◽  
Ashley Hagaman ◽  
Celia Islam ◽  
Ada Thapa ◽  
...  

Abstract Background: The social environment, including social support, social burden, and quality of interactions, influences a range of health outcomes, including mental health. Passive audio data collection on mobile phones (e.g., episodic recording of the auditory environment without requiring any active input from the phone user) enables new opportunities to understand the social environment. We evaluated the use of passive audio collection on mobile phones as a window onto the relationship between the social environment within a study of mental health among adolescent mothers in Nepal.Methods: We enrolled 23 adolescent mothers who first participated in qualitative interviews to describe their social support and identify sounds potentially associated with that support. Then episodic recordings were collected for two weeks from the same women using an app to capture 30 seconds of audio every 15 minutes from 4am to 9pm. Audio data were processed and classified using a pretrained model. Each classification category was accompanied by a predicted accuracy score. Manual validation of the machine-predicted speech and non-speech categories (10%) was done for accuracy.Results: In qualitative interviews, mothers described a range of positive and negative social interactions and the sounds that accompanied these. Potential positive sounds included adult speech and laughter, baby babbling and laughter, and sounds from baby toys. Sounds characterizing negative stimuli included yelling, crying, screaming by adults and crying by babies. Sounds associated with social isolation included silence and TV or radio noises. Speech comprised of 43% of all passively recorded audio clips (n=7725). Manual validation showed a 23% false positive rate and 62% false-negative rate for speech, demonstrating potential underestimation of speech exposure. Other common sounds included music and vehicular noises.Conclusions: Passively capturing audio has the potential to improve understanding of the social environment. However, the limited accuracy of the pre-trained model used in this study did not adequately distinguish between positive and negative social interactions. To improve the contribution of passive audio collection to understanding the social environment, future work should improve the accuracy of audio categorization, code for constellations of sounds, and combine audio with other smartphone data collection such as location and activity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 205920431774574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daisy Fancourt ◽  
Rosie Perkins

Among mammals who invest in the production of a relatively small number of offspring, bonding is a critical strategy for survival. Mother–infant bonding among humans is not only linked with the infant’s survival but also with a range of protective psychological, biological, and behavioral responses in both mothers and infants in the post-birth period and across the life span. Anthropological theories suggest that one behavior that may have evolved with the aim of enhancing mother–infant bonding is infant-directed singing. However, to date, despite mother–infant singing being practiced across cultures, there remains little quantitative demonstration of any effects on mothers or their perceived closeness to their infants. This within-subjects study, comparing the effects of mother–infant singing with other mother–infant interactions among 43 mothers and their infants, shows that singing is associated with greater increases in maternal perceptions of emotional closeness in comparison to social interactions. Mother–infant singing is also associated with greater increases in positive affect and greater decreases in negative affect as well as greater decreases in both psychological and biological markers of anxiety. This supports previous findings about the effects of singing on closeness and social bonding in other populations. Furthermore, associations between changes in closeness and both affect and anxiety support previous research suggesting associations between closeness, bonding, and wider mental health.


Author(s):  
Gil G. Rosenthal

This chapter focuses on social interactions, in the broadest sense, as sources of variation in mate choice and mating preferences. These interactions can be divided into three categories corresponding to when they are specified and which individuals are involved. The first includes effects that are determined before birth and transmitted vertically from parents: epigenetic modifications to the genome and the fetal or embryonic environment. The second includes influences between birth and sexual maturity, when the phenotypes of parents and/or other sexually mature, older individuals (oblique transmission) direct the development of preferences in choosers. Experience with courters and choosers after sexual maturity, or experience with other juveniles that shapes subsequent preferences, constitutes peer (horizontal) transmission.


Author(s):  
Mark Porter

This chapter takes, as its starting provocation, Tanya Kevorkian’s suggestion that performances of Bach’s cantata compositions would originally have taken place within a somewhat noisy social environment. Drawing from the wider field of literature on listening and noise in other historical and contemporary contexts, it examines the potential for sonic interactions between different actors to set up patterns of social resonance. It draws out the consequences of taking these sonic and social interactions seriously in understandings of musical performance and experience. Many analyses consider noise primarily as a distraction to attentive listening. This chapter, however, highlights its role in processes of meaning making and in establishing different sets of relationships between performers, congregation, and the divine.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostadin Kushlev ◽  
Ryan Dwyer ◽  
Elizabeth W. Dunn

Smartphones provide people with a variety of benefits, but they may also impose subtle social costs. We propose that being constantly connected undercuts the emotional benefits of face-to-face social interactions in two ways. First, smartphone use may diminish the emotional benefits of ongoing social interactions by preventing us from giving our full attention to friends and family in our immediate social environment. Second, smartphones may lead people to miss out on the emotional benefits of casual social interactions by supplanting such interactions altogether. Across field experiments and experience-sampling studies, we find that smartphones consistently interfere with the emotional benefits people could otherwise reap from their broader social environment. We also find that the costs of smartphone use are fairly subtle, contrary to proclamations in the popular press that smartphones are ruining our social lives. By highlighting how smartphones affect the benefits we derive from our broader social environment, this work provides a foundation for building theory and research on the consequences of mobile technology for human well-being.


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