1,516 research outputs found
Children’s Reporting of Peers’ Behaviour
This thesis describes a mixed-methods investigation of young children’s everyday social communication, focusing on tattling—the reporting of a peer’s negative behaviour to an audience. There are links between tattling and the development of gossip, and thus with the evolution of cooperative norms in humans. Tattling is a daily activity for many children, but has been little studied, especially in preschool contexts. \ud
Quantitative sampling and participant observation are used to characterize behavioural reporting among 3- to 4-year-olds in 2 preschools in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Quantitative sampling shows that children in these populations are biased towards reporting negative actions by peers; that they are more likely to report actions of which they themselves are the victims; that they usually tell the truth; that their reports are rarely ignored by staff; and that there are relationships between frequency of tattling and measures of social dominance and relational aggression. Participant observation shows that tattling takes place in a complex social context; that children are generally aware of its effects; and that it is driven by a range of motivations, both self-oriented and group-oriented. \ud
Two story recall experiments are described, aimed at testing the hypothesis that negative bias in children’s reports arises from the greater salience of negative behaviour. The experiments do not support this hypothesis, further strengthening the idea that children are acting out of strategic considerations when they report peers’ transgressions. Behavioural reporting in preschool contexts is compared with a sample of transcripts of children’s discourse recorded in 1970s England and stored in the CHILDES database. Examples of tattling and gossip are also found in the eHRAF ethnographic database. The thesis concludes with an interactionist model of the development of tattling and gossip, in which third-party mediation helps to integrate the affective and normative components of children’s developing moral systems.\u
From hitting to tattling to gossip: An evolutionary rationale for the development of indirect aggression
Adult humans are characterized by low rates of intra-group physical aggression, relative to both human children and non-human animals. I propose that the suppression of physically aggressive tendencies has been achieved partly through the replacement of dominance hierarchies by prestige hierarchies, driven by indirect reciprocity and mediated by indirectly aggressive competition and linguistic transmission of reputations. Reviewing the developmental literature on indirect aggression and related constructs provides three pieces of evidence that evolutionarily old impulses towards physical aggression are gradually socialized into indirect aggression: (i) physical aggression falls in early childhood over the same age range during which indirect aggression increases; (ii) the same individuals engage in both physical and indirect aggression; and (iii) dominant individuals practice indirect aggression more frequently. Consideration of the developmental course of indirect aggression is complemented by analysis of similar developments in verbal behaviors that are not necessarily aggressive, namely tattling and gossip. Two developmental transitions in indirect aggression and related behaviors are postulated. The first occurs in early childhood as children become aware of norms against physical aggression. The second occurs in preadolescence with the development of increasingly covert forms of reputational competition, as children try to renegotiate their status within peer social networks
The adaptive problem of absent third-party punishment
Language is a uniquely human behaviour, which has presented unique adaptive problems. Prominent among these is the transmission of information that may affect an individual’s reputation. The possibility of punishment of those with a low reputation by absent third parties has created a selective pressure on human beings that is not shared by any other species. This has led to the evolution of unique cognitive structures that are capable of handling such a novel adaptive challenge. One of these, we argue, is the propositional theory of mind, which enables individuals to model, and potentially manipulate, their own reputation in the minds of other group members, by representing the beliefs that others have about the first party’s intentions and actions. Support for our theoretical model is provided by an observational study on tattling in two preschools, and an experimental study of giving under threat of gossip in a dictator game
A computational approach towards conflict resolution for serious games
Conflict is an unavoidable feature of life, but the development of conflict resolution management skills can facilitate the parties involved in resolving their conflicts in a positive manner. The goal of our research is to develop a serious game in which children may experiment with conflict resolution strategies and learn how to work towards positive conflict outcomes. While serious games related to conflict exist at present, our work represents the first attempt to teach conflict resolution skills through a game in a manner informed by sociological and psychological theories of conflict and current best practice for conflict resolution. In this paper, we present a computational approach to conflict generation and resolution. We describe the five phases involved in our conflict modeling process: conflict situation creation, conflict detection, player modeling and conflict strategy prediction, conflict management, and conflict resolution, and discuss the three major elements of our player model: assertiveness, cooperativeness, and relationship. Finally, we overview a simple resource management game we have developed in which we have begun experimenting with our conflict model concepts.peer-reviewe
A computational approach towards conflict resolution for serious games
Conflict is an unavoidable feature of life, but the development of conflict resolution management skills can facilitate the parties involved in resolving their conflicts in a positive manner. The goal of our research is to develop a serious game in which children may experiment with conflict resolution strategies and learn how to work towards positive conflict outcomes. While serious games related to conflict exist at present, our work represents the first attempt to teach conflict resolution skills through a game in a manner informed by sociological and psychological theories of conflict and current best practice for conflict resolution. In this paper, we present a computational approach to conflict generation and resolution. We describe the five phases involved in our conflict modeling process: conflict situation creation, conflict detection, player modeling and conflict strategy prediction, conflict management, and conflict resolution, and discuss the three major elements of our player model: assertiveness, cooperativeness, and relationship. Finally, we overview a simple resource management game we have developed in which we have begun experimenting with our conflict model concepts.peer-reviewe
Methodological approaches to determining the marine radiocarbon reservoir effect
The marine radiocarbon reservoir effect is an offset in 14C age between contemporaneous organisms from the terrestrial environment and organisms that derive their carbon from the marine environment. Quantification of this effect is of crucial importance for correct calibration of the <sup>14</sup>C ages of marine-influenced samples to the calendrical timescale. This is fundamental to the construction of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental chronologies when such samples are employed in <sup>14</sup>C analysis. Quantitative measurements of temporal variations in regional marine reservoir ages also have the potential to be used as a measure of process changes within Earth surface systems, due to their link with climatic and oceanic changes. The various approaches to quantification of the marine radiocarbon reservoir effect are assessed, focusing particularly on the North Atlantic Ocean. Currently, the global average marine reservoir age of surface waters, R(t), is c. 400 radiocarbon years; however, regional values deviate from this as a function of climate and oceanic circulation systems. These local deviations from R(t) are expressed as +R values. Hence, polar waters exhibit greater reservoir ages (δR = c. +400 to +800 <sup>14</sup>C y) than equatorial waters (δR = c. 0 <sup>14</sup>C y). Observed temporal variations in δR appear to reflect climatic and oceanographic changes. We assess three approaches to quantification of marine reservoir effects using known age samples (from museum collections), tephra isochrones (present onshore/offshore) and paired marine/terrestrial samples (from the same context in, for example, archaeological sites). The strengths and limitations of these approaches are evaluated using examples from the North Atlantic region. It is proposed that, with a suitable protocol, accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measurements on paired, short-lived, single entity marine and terrestrial samples from archaeological deposits is the most promising approach to constraining changes over at least the last 5 ky BP
Vitellogenin Underwent Subfunctionalization to Acquire Caste and Behavioral Specific Expression in the Harvester Ant Pogonomyrmex barbatus
PMCID: PMC3744404This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication
Survey of A_LT' asymmetries in semi-exclusive electron scattering on He4 and C12
Single spin azimuthal asymmetries A_LT' were measured at Jefferson Lab using
2.2 and 4.4 GeV longitudinally polarized electrons incident on He4 and C12
targets in the CLAS detector. A_LT' is related to the imaginary part of the
longitudinal-transverse interference and in quasifree nucleon knockout it
provides an unambiguous signature for final state interactions (FSI).
Experimental values of A_LT' were found to be below 5%, typically |A_LT'| < 3%
for data with good statistical precision. Optical Model in Eikonal
Approximation (OMEA) and Relativistic Multiple-Scattering Glauber Approximation
(RMSGA) calculations are shown to be consistent with the measured asymmetries.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
Gravitational Waves From Known Pulsars: Results From The Initial Detector Era
We present the results of searches for gravitational waves from a large selection of pulsars using data from the most recent science runs (S6, VSR2 and VSR4) of the initial generation of interferometric gravitational wave detectors LIGO (Laser Interferometric Gravitational-wave Observatory) and Virgo. We do not see evidence for gravitational wave emission from any of the targeted sources but produce upper limits on the emission amplitude. We highlight the results from seven young pulsars with large spin-down luminosities. We reach within a factor of five of the canonical spin-down limit for all seven of these, whilst for the Crab and Vela pulsars we further surpass their spin-down limits. We present new or updated limits for 172 other pulsars (including both young and millisecond pulsars). Now that the detectors are undergoing major upgrades, and, for completeness, we bring together all of the most up-to-date results from all pulsars searched for during the operations of the first-generation LIGO, Virgo and GEO600 detectors. This gives a total of 195 pulsars including the most recent results described in this paper.United States National Science FoundationScience and Technology Facilities Council of the United KingdomMax-Planck-SocietyState of Niedersachsen/GermanyAustralian Research CouncilInternational Science Linkages program of the Commonwealth of AustraliaCouncil of Scientific and Industrial Research of IndiaIstituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare of ItalySpanish Ministerio de Economia y CompetitividadConselleria d'Economia Hisenda i Innovacio of the Govern de les Illes BalearsNetherlands Organisation for Scientific ResearchPolish Ministry of Science and Higher EducationFOCUS Programme of Foundation for Polish ScienceRoyal SocietyScottish Funding CouncilScottish Universities Physics AllianceNational Aeronautics and Space AdministrationOTKA of HungaryLyon Institute of Origins (LIO)National Research Foundation of KoreaIndustry CanadaProvince of Ontario through the Ministry of Economic Development and InnovationNational Science and Engineering Research Council CanadaCarnegie TrustLeverhulme TrustDavid and Lucile Packard FoundationResearch CorporationAlfred P. Sloan FoundationAstronom
Two-Nucleon Momentum Distributions Measured in 3He(e,e'pp)n
We have measured the 3He(e,e'pp)n reaction at 2.2 GeV over a wide kinematic
range. The kinetic energy distribution for `fast' nucleons (p > 250 MeV/c)
peaks where two nucleons each have 20% or less, and the third nucleon has most
of the transferred energy. These fast pp and pn pairs are back-to-back with
little momentum along the three-momentum transfer, indicating that they are
spectators. Experimental and theoretical evidence indicates that we have
measured distorted two-nucleon momentum distributions by striking the third
nucleon and detecting the spectator correlated pair.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, submitted to PR
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