James W. Pennebaker: University of Texas at AustinThe smallest and most frequently used words in English are function words -- pronouns, prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, etc. These overlooked words are profoundly social and can signal the ways people think, feel, and relate to others. Using a variety of text analysis methods, it is possible to […]
Mark Handcock: University of California, Los AngelesIn this talk we give an overview of social network analysis from the perspective of a statistician. The networks field is, and has been, broadly multidisciplinary with significant contributions from the social, natural and mathematical sciences. This has lead to a plethora of terminology, and network conceptualizations commensurate with […]
Ben Karney: University of California, Los AngelesAmong strangers, no variable has as much power to predict interpersonal judgments as physical appearance. In particular, more physically attractive people are judged as more desirable romantic partners, and generally males have been found to be more affected by a partner’s physical appearance than females. But does physical appearance […]
John Capitanio: University of California, DavisThere has been a growing interest in the study of animal personality, and nonhuman primate research has played a significant role in this field for many decades. My research program has focused on the causes and consequences of variation in personality dimensions in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta). In this talk, […]
Lynn Fairbanks: UCLAThere has been considerable interest in gestational and neonatal influences on developmental trajectories in humans and other mammals in recent years. This presentation reviews results from the Vervet Research Colony demonstrating effects of maternal condition, diet and weight loss on maternal and infant behavior. To understand the impact of variation in maternal investment […]
Barry Hewlett: Washington State University, VancouverCultural anthropologists Margaret Mead, David Lancy, and Barbara Rogoff indicate that teaching does not exist or is rare in small-scale cultures. By contrast, recent research by cognitive neuroscientists Gyorgy Gergely and Gergely Csibra indicate that one type of teaching, called natural pedagogy, is a human universal, part of human nature, […]
Montserrat Soler: University of California, Santa BarbaraIn the last ten years, there has been a surge of work dedicated to the study of religion from the point of view of evolutionary studies and cognitive science. These accounts of religion are divided into two main areas: one views religious concepts as by-products of other cognitive capacities, […]
Michelle Kline: The University of California, Los AngelesHumans are heavily reliant on cultural adaptation, and have coevolved with culture for millennia. Teaching enhances the fidelity of cultural transmission and should be common in such a culture-dependent species. However, existing data present a puzzle concerning the role of teaching in human evolution. While biologists have documented […]
Lucia Jacobs: University of Caliornia, BerkeleyThe chemical senses of vertebrates present some of the most enduring mysteries of brain evolution. First, it is not clear why are there two olfactory systems: the main system (MOS), detecting odorants on the olfactory epithelium and projecting to the olfactory bulb, and the accessory system (AOS), detecting odorants in […]
Rich Connor: University of Massachusetts DartmouthFor over 25 years we have documented a multi-level alliance structure among male bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Western Australia. Males cooperate in pairs and trios, ‘1st-order alliances,’ to form temporary consortships with individual females. First-order alliance partners are drawn from a male’s second-order alliance. Second-order alliances have 4-14 males […]
