Post-conflict affiliation by chimpanzees with aggressors: other-oriented versus selfish political strategy

Consolation, i.e., post-conflict affiliation directed from bystanders to recent victims of aggression, has recently acquired an important role in the debate about empathy in great apes. Although similar contacts have been also described for aggressors, i.e., appeasement, they have received far less attention and their function and underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. An exceptionally large database of spontaneous conflict and post-conflict interactions in two outdoor-housed groups of chimpanzees lends support to the notion that affiliation toward aggressors reduces the latter's aggressive tendencies in that further aggression was less frequent after the occurrence of the affiliation. However, bystander affiliation toward aggressors occurred disproportionally between individuals that were socially close (i.e., affiliation partners) which suggest that it did not function to protect the actor itself against redirected aggression. Contrary to consolation behavior, it was provided most often by adult males and directed toward high ranking males, whereas females engaged less often in this behavior both as actors and recipients, suggesting that affiliation with aggressors is unlikely to be a reaction to the distress of others. We propose that bystander affiliation toward aggressors may function to strengthen bonds between valuable partners, probably as part of political strategies. Our findings also suggest that this post-conflict behavior may act as an alternative to reconciliation, i.e., post-conflict affiliation between opponents, in that it is more common when opponents fail to reconcile.     

Understanding the Role of the ‘Self’ in the Social Priming of Mimicry

People have a tendency to unconsciously mimic other''s actions. This mimicry has been regarded as a prosocial response which increases social affiliation. Previous research on social priming of mimicry demonstrated an assimilative relationship between mimicry and prosociality of the primed construct: prosocial primes elicit stronger mimicry whereas antisocial primes decrease mimicry. The present research extends these findings by showing that assimilative and contrasting prime-to-behavior effect can both happen on mimicry. Specifically, experiment 1 showed a robust contrast priming effect where priming antisocial behaviors induces stronger mimicry than priming prosocial behaviors. In experiment 2, we manipulated the self-relatedness of the pro/antisocial primes and further revealed that prosocial primes increase mimicry only when the social primes are self-related whereas antisocial primes increase mimicry only when the social primes are self-unrelated. In experiment 3, we used a novel cartoon movie paradigm to prime pro/antisocial behaviors and manipulated the perspective-taking when participants were watching these movies. Again, we found that prosocial primes increase mimicry only when participants took a first-person point of view whereas antisocial primes increase mimicry only when participants took a third-person point of view, which replicated the findings in experiment 2. We suggest that these three studies can be best explained by the active-self theory, which claims that the direction of prime-to-behavior effects depends on how primes are processed in relation to the ‘self’.     

Bonobos Protect and Console Friends and Kin

Post-conflict third-party affiliation has been reported to have different functional meanings, one of them being consolation. Here, we tested the main hypotheses that have been put forth to explain the presence of this phenomenon at a functional level in the bonobo: Self-Protection Hypothesis, Victim-Protection Hypothesis, Relationship-Repair or Substitute for Reconciliation Hypothesis, and Consolation Hypothesis. By analyzing the data collected over 10 years, we investigated what factors affected the distribution of both spontaneous third party affiliation (initiated by the bystander) and solicited third party affiliation (initiated by the victim). We considered factors related to the individual features (sex, rank, age) of victim and bystander, their relationship quality (kinship, affiliation), and the effect that third party affiliation had on the victim (such as protection against further attacks and anxiety reduction). Both spontaneous and solicited third party affiliation reduced the probability of further aggression by group members on the victim (Victim-Protection Hypothesis supported). Yet, only spontaneous affiliation reduced victim anxiety (measured via self-scratching), thus suggesting that the spontaneous gesture – more than the protection itself – works in calming the distressed subject. The victim may perceive the motivational autonomy of the bystander, who does not require an invitation to provide post-conflict affiliative contact. Moreover, spontaneous - but not solicited - third party affiliation was affected by the bond between consoler and victim, being the relationship between consoler and aggressor irrelevant to the phenomenon distribution (Consolation Hypothesis supported). Spontaneous affiliation followed the empathic gradient described for humans, being mostly offered to kin, then friends, then acquaintances. Overall, our findings do not only indicate the consolatory function of spontaneous third-party affiliation but they also suggest that consolation in the bonobo may be an empathy-based phenomenon.     

Status of nutrition and health claims in Europe

Functional foods are closely associated with claims on foods. There are two categories of claims on foods: nutrition claims and health claims. Health claims on (functional) foods must be scientifically substantiated. In December 2006, the European Union published its Regulation 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims made on foods. As concerns scientific evaluation, the EU-project PASSCLAIM resulted in a set of criteria for the scientific substantiation of health claims on foods. The European Food Safety Authority provides the scientific advise to the European Commission for health claims submitted under Regulation 1924/2006 and has hitherto published several hundreds of opinions on health claims, part of which are positive, part which are negative and a few with insufficient evidence. Antioxidant claims have been approved for the general function of vitamins but not for direct health effects in humans. Another issue with claims is consumer understanding. Consumers can hardly distinguish between graded levels of evidence, and they do make only little or no distinction between nutrition and health claims. Consumers understand nutrition and health claims different from scientists and regulators. Therefore, innovation in industry can readily proceed via approved nutrition claims and approved health claims. The market and the shelves in the stores will not be empty; rather they will look different in the years to come.     

Narrative event segmentation in the cortical reservoir

Recent research has revealed that during continuous perception of movies or stories, humans display cortical activity patterns that reveal hierarchical segmentation of event structure. Thus, sensory areas like auditory cortex display high frequency segmentation related to the stimulus, while semantic areas like posterior middle cortex display a lower frequency segmentation related to transitions between events. These hierarchical levels of segmentation are associated with different time constants for processing. Likewise, when two groups of participants heard the same sentence in a narrative, preceded by different contexts, neural responses for the groups were initially different and then gradually aligned. The time constant for alignment followed the segmentation hierarchy: sensory cortices aligned most quickly, followed by mid-level regions, while some higher-order cortical regions took more than 10 seconds to align. These hierarchical segmentation phenomena can be considered in the context of processing related to comprehension. In a recently described model of discourse comprehension word meanings are modeled by a language model pre-trained on a billion word corpus. During discourse comprehension, word meanings are continuously integrated in a recurrent cortical network. The model demonstrates novel discourse and inference processing, in part because of two fundamental characteristics: real-world event semantics are represented in the word embeddings, and these are integrated in a reservoir network which has an inherent gradient of functional time constants due to the recurrent connections. Here we demonstrate how this model displays hierarchical narrative event segmentation properties beyond the embeddings alone, or their linear integration. The reservoir produces activation patterns that are segmented by a hidden Markov model (HMM) in a manner that is comparable to that of humans. Context construction displays a continuum of time constants across reservoir neuron subsets, while context forgetting has a fixed time constant across these subsets. Importantly, virtual areas formed by subgroups of reservoir neurons with faster time constants segmented with shorter events, while those with longer time constants preferred longer events. This neurocomputational recurrent neural network simulates narrative event processing as revealed by the fMRI event segmentation algorithm provides a novel explanation of the asymmetry in narrative forgetting and construction. The model extends the characterization of online integration processes in discourse to more extended narrative, and demonstrates how reservoir computing provides a useful model of cortical processing of narrative structure.     

Strategic allocation of ejaculates by male Adélie penguins

Sperm competition theory suggests that males should strategically allocate sperm to those females that will bring them the best possible genetic returns. Although males of a number of species of insects and fishes have been shown to allocate sperm strategically, we provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence that an avian species is also capable of allocating ejaculates. Male Adélie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) are more likely to transfer sperm during extra-pair copulations (EPCs) than during pair copulations. We investigated the question of how males allocate ejaculates within the constraints of limited sperm availability and found (i) that males that engaged in EPC attempts ejaculated less often when copulating with their social partner than males that made no EPC attempts, and (ii) that there was no difference between males that were involved in failed EPC attempts and those that were involved in successful EPCs in the proportion of copulations that resulted in sperm transfer. These results indicate that males achieve strategic allocation of sperm within the constraints of limited sperm availability by withholding ejaculates from their social partners.     

Language analysis in the United Kingdom's refugee status determination system: seeing through policy claims about ‘expert knowledge’

This paper examines claims made about the role of ‘expert knowledge’ in analysing the language of individuals seeking asylum in the UK. I treat policy as a type of power and seek to understand how this policy uses the language of science to further the British government's stated interest to provide ‘secure borders’ and a ‘safe haven’ for refugees. I look at how the Home Office defines, shapes and implements the policy, and at how the policy has influenced judicial decisions. In short I unmask UKBA's claim that it relies upon expert, scientific knowledge to assess asylum claims.     

The contested rewe: sacred sites,misunderstandings, and ontological pluralism in Mapuche land negotiations

Sacred sites lie at the core of indigenous peoples' land claims and negotiations with the state. These sites are often subject to accusations of inauthenticity by state actors, which potentially lead to the delegitimization of claims over ancestral land. This article argues that misunderstandings in Mapuche land negotiations in Chile do not originate as strategic refusals to understand, but rather in a form of understanding which aims to make radical differences commensurable within the logics of statecraft and national society. In the process of cultural translation, the ontological principles that make certain places sacred in the Mapuche lived world are not recognized, resulting in the transformation of these sites into symbols of identity strategically employed for political ends.     

Receiving post-conflict affiliation from the enemy's friend reconciles former opponents

The adaptive function of bystander initiated post-conflict affiliation (also: consolation & appeasement) has been debated for 30 years. Three influential hypotheses compete for the most likely explanation but have not previously been tested with a single data set. The consolation hypothesis argues that bystander affiliation calms the victim and reduces their stress levels. The self-protection hypothesis proposes that a bystander offers affiliation to either opponent to protect himself from redirected aggression by this individual. The relationship-repair hypothesis suggests a bystander can substitute for a friend to reconcile the friend with the friend''s former opponent. Here, we contrast all three hypotheses and tested their predictions with data on wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) of the Taï National Park, Côte d''Ivoire. We examined the first and second post-conflict interactions with respect to both the dyadic and triadic relationships between the bystander and the two opponents. Results showed that female bystanders offered affiliation to their aggressor friends and the victims of their friends, while male bystanders offered affiliation to their victim friends and the aggressors of their friends. For both sexes, bystander affiliation resulted in a subsequent interaction pattern that is expected for direct reconciliation. Bystander affiliation offered to the opponent''s friend was more likely to lead to affiliation among opponents in their subsequent interaction. Also, tolerance levels among former opponents were reset to normal levels. In conclusion, this study provides strong evidence for the relationship-repair hypothesis, moderate evidence for the consolation hypothesis and no evidence for the self-protection hypothesis. Furthermore, that bystanders can repair a relationship on behalf of their friend indicates that recipient chimpanzees are aware of the relationships between others, even when they are not kin. This presents a mechanism through which chimpanzees may gain benefits from social knowledge.     

Urban Kampongs in Ambon: Whose Domain? Whose Desa?

A devastating fire in a poor quarter of the city of Ambon, Eastern Indonesia, provided the context in which a number of the social, cultural and historical factors shaping the lives of the city's residents came to the fore. The paper argues that to comprehend the experiences of people whose lives were touched by the fire, and to appreciate its significance, the meanings ascribed to the event, it is necessary to comprehend those multiple factors in all their complexity and interpenetration. The paper argues that the symbolic construction of urban space and its constitution as ‘place’ are continuously emergent out of processes which appear in transformational moments, such as this fire. Physical changes to the quarter through time are examined to demonstrate their relevance to understanding the contemporary social processes and their local interpretations. The migratory origins of the people; continuing divisions between Christian and Muslim populations; the ongoing relevance of ancestral spirits and magic; the role of colonial and postcolonial states, and Ambon's strategic position, are all argued to be important to understanding the meaning of the place and the use of space in the city. The implications of the intersection of at least four clusters of ideas about space and place are considered critical to any adequate account of the contemporary lives of Ambonese and to explaining how it comes to be that some residents can become permanently displaced. The argument emphasises the processual nature of the understandings of space in the urban context.     

Hormonal systems,human social bonding,and affiliation

Which hormones are implicated in human social bonding and affiliation? And how does field research speak to this issue? We begin by laying out a broad view of how endocrine hormones in general modulate life history allocations of energy and other resources, and the ways in which their neuromodulatory functions must be understood within a broader conceptualization of how they have been shaped to affect allocations. We then turn to four specific hormones or hormone families that have received much attention: oxytocin, opioids, prolactin, and progesterone. Each plays a role in regulating psychological capacities and propensities that underlie individuals' interactions with important social targets. Yet in no case is it clear exactly what regulatory roles these hormones play. We suggest several directions for future research.     

The Importance of Considering the Behavioral Form of Reconciliation in Studies of Conflict Resolution

Reconciliation is the most extensively studied conflict resolution mechanism in animal societies. However, despite the extensive literature on this topic, behaviors considered to represent postconflict affiliation have not been consistent across studies of reconciliation. Critically, reconciliation is usually defined as postconflict contact affiliation, e.g., grooming, and the importance of including interopponent distance regulation is often neglected. Moreover, to date, no study has simultaneously investigated different behavioral forms of reconciliation. We tested in two groups of wild Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) the relative importance of postconflict close proximity and grooming in the mediation of two important costs of aggression: damage to the opponent’s social relationship and elevated postconflict anxiety. We provide evidence that close-proximity approaches function to resolve conflicts: Close-proximity approaches reduced the victim’s postconflict anxiety and were predicted by the quality of the social relationship with the opponent. Moreover, postconflict grooming alone, although predicted by the quality of the opponent’s social relationship, did not influence the victim’s elevated postconflict anxiety. Our results suggest that interopponent distance regulation plays an important role in reconciling the costs of aggression in Barbary macaques. We advocate that further efforts should be made to test which behaviors play a role in conflict resolution in different species. This is important because even closely related species may differ in the function of behaviors that superficially appear to be rather similar. Moreover, the choice of behaviors used to study conflict resolution determines the frequency with which reconciliation is observed and can thus bias comparisons across species.     

Changing claims in context: national identity revisited

This article re-examines how willing the English and Scots are to accept or reject claims to respective national identities by people born elsewhere. A previous paper showed, counter-intuitively, that people in the two countries were similar in their willingness to accept claims to national identity. Since then, different political parties are in power in England and Scotland, with differing policies and attitudes to identity. Have the original findings changed in the context of this significant political change? We conclude that the English and Scots continue to be similar on accepting or rejecting claims. However, they have diverged with regard to claims by white people, with national identity a less important explanatory variable than education in Scotland, whereas in England it remains the determining factor. For claims by non-whites, the two societies have become more similar. Education remains in Scotland, and to a considerable extent in England, the more important explanatory variable.     

Introduction: Reclaiming Paradigms Lost

This introduction is a critical response to claims made about the demise and revival of the sub‐discipline of kinship studies. Contemporary calls to a reclaimed and revitalised area rest, ironically, on a misplaced concentration on the preoccupations of dominant cultures, one of the grounds used to discard kinship in the past. It is argued that many of the issues debated up to the 1970s in the domain of kinship involve more general problems such as arguments about structure and process, gender and biology and the way in which indigenous categories are to be apprehended and accommodated in a genuinely comparative discipline. The case is also made that kinship's demise is largely an Anglocentric phenomenon and that the continuing importance of many of the issues debated in the past, such as the relationship between people and land and its local ideological representations and global consequences, make knowledge of kinship's more exotic manifestations vital to contemporary graduates. The final section introduces the papers in the volume, each of which addresses, in a contemporary and critical way, an area that was important to previous kinship debates and remains of interest in the present.     

The Middle East's majority problems: minoritarian regimes and the threat of democracy

This article examines the phenomenon of minoritarian regimes in the Middle East, focusing on Bahrain, Syria and Israel/Palestine. It considers, in each, how minority rule was established, the mechanisms through which it is maintained, and the means through which it is legitimated. Although these regimes are not typically analyzed as a category, they have important features in common. In all three, the state's political and security institutions are controlled by members of an ethnic/religious group that is a numerical minority in the country, at the expense of a majority group with a competing claim to indigeneity. While the legal and political mechanisms that these regimes use to restrict access to power vary, they employ similar strategies for legitimating minority rule, presenting democracy as a threat not only to the regime's survival, but also to the security of the group whose interests it claims to represent.     

Bodily rights and collective claims: the work of legal activists in interpreting reproductive and maternal rights in India

This article engages with anthropological approaches to the study of global human rights discourses around reproductive and maternal health in India. Whether couched in the language of human rights or of other social justice frameworks, different forms of claims‐making in India exist in tandem and correspond to particular traditions of activism and struggle. Universal reproductive rights language remains a discourse aimed at the state in India, where the primary purpose is to demand greater accountability in the domain of policy and governance. Outside of these spheres, other languages are strategically chosen by activists for their greater resonance in addressing individual cases of women claiming reproductive violence within the context of the family as well as localized histories of feminist struggle and social justice. In focusing on the work of legal activists and the discourses which inform their interventions, this article seeks to understand how the language of reproductive rights is used in the context of India, not as a `Western import' which is adapted to local contexts, but rather as one of multiple frameworks of claims‐making drawn upon by legal activists emerging from distinct histories of struggle for gender equality and social justice.     

The behavioral context of visual displays in common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus)

Communication is important in social species, and may occur with the use of visual, olfactory or auditory signals. However, visual communication may be hampered in species that are arboreal have elaborate facial coloring and live in small groups. The common marmoset fits these criteria and may have limited visual communication. Nonetheless, some (contradictive) propositions concerning visual displays in the common marmoset have been made, yet quantitative data are lacking. The aim of this study was to assign a behavioral context to different visual displays using pre–post‐event‐analyses. Focal observations were conducted on 16 captive adult and sub‐adult marmosets in three different family groups. Based on behavioral elements with an unambiguous meaning, four different behavioral contexts were distinguished: aggression, fear, affiliation, and play behavior. Visual displays concerned behavior that included facial expressions, body postures, and pilo‐erection of the fur. Visual displays related to aggression, fear, and play/affiliation were consistent with the literature. We propose that the visual display “pilo‐erection tip of tail” is related to fear. Individuals receiving these fear signals showed a higher rate of affiliative behavior. This study indicates that several visual displays may provide cues or signals of particular social contexts. Since the three displays of fear elicited an affiliative response, they may communicate a request of anxiety reduction or signal an external referent. Concluding, common marmosets, despite being arboreal and living in small groups, use several visual displays to communicate with conspecifics and their facial coloration may not hamper, but actually promote the visibility of visual displays. Am. J. Primatol. 75:1084–1095, 2013. © 2013 The Authors. American Journal of Primatology Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Watching Photos in Shatila: Visualizing Politics in the 2011 March of Return

This article focuses on the 2011 March of Return in Lebanon and explores the epistemic gap between image and event, examining how nationalist iconography of the Israel–Palestine conflict informs and distorts popular understanding of the political concerns of refugees. News outlets and social media distilled the march’s political symbolism into one of determination and resolve, with refugee claims directed exclusively at Israel. Camp discussions meanwhile revealed fractured and equivocal motives, including sharp if variously veiled critiques of the Palestinian factions, the Shia political party Hezbollah, and the Lebanese State. Local debates about representation—about the production, dissemination, and interpretation of political images—are significant in their skepticism about the democratizing effects of social media, and in their suggestiveness about emergent forms of political life and aspiration for which no visual grammar yet exists.     

The impact of paternity on male–infant association in a primate with low paternity certainty

In multimale groups where females mate promiscuously, male–infant associations have rarely been studied. However, recent studies have shown that males selectively support their offspring during agonistic conflicts with other juveniles and that father's presence accelerates offspring maturation. Furthermore, it was shown that males invest in unrelated infants to enhance future mating success with the infant's mother. Hence, infant care might provide fitness gain for males. Here, we investigate male–infant associations in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), a primate with low paternity certainty as females mate with multiple partners and males ensure paternity less efficiently through mate‐guarding. We combined behavioural data with genetic paternity analyses of one cohort of the semi‐free‐ranging population of Cayo Santiago (Puerto Rico) and recorded affiliative and aggressive interactions between focal subjects and adult males from birth to sexual maturation (0–4 years) of focal subjects. Our results revealed that 9.6% of all interactions of focal subjects involved an adult male and 94% of all male–infant interactions were affiliative, indicating the rareness of male–infant aggression. Second and most interestingly, sires were more likely to affiliate with their offspring than nonsires with unrelated infants. This preference was independent of mother's proximity and emphasized during early infancy. Male–infant affiliation rose with infant age and was pronounced between adult males and male rather than female focal subjects. Overall, our results suggest that male–infant affiliation is also an important component in structuring primate societies and affiliation directed towards own offspring presumably represent low‐cost paternal care.