Headbob displays signal sex, social context and species identity in a Liolaemus lizard

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalin S. Vicente
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
Anterior Part ◽  
Natural Habitat ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Visual Signals ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Species Identity ◽  
The Social

Abstract Animal communication has a key role in animals and identifying the signals’ function is crucial. Most lizards communicate with each other through visual signals with headbob displays, which are up-and-down movements of the head or the anterior part of the body. In the present work, I described and analysed the headbob displays of Liolaemus pacha lizards in their natural habitat. Specifically, the objectives were to describe the form of headbobs, to analyse their structure and to compare between sexes and social contexts. Adult lizards were video-recorded, registering the sex and the social context, classified as broadcast, same-sex and female-male interactions. The form and structure of sequences and headbobs were obtained. To evaluate the effect of sex and social context on the structure of headbob sequences and on headbob bouts, generalized linear mixed models were made. Intersexual differences were found in headbob display frequency and in the structure of headbob sequences. Lizards in same-sex context made sequences with more bouts, shorter intervals, headbob bouts of longer duration and higher amplitude than broadcast and female-male context. Presence of concurring behaviour such as lateral compression, gular expansion, and back arching occurred simultaneously with headbobs in same-sex context. Liolaemus pacha made four different headbob bout forms, and males were characterised by using bouts A and B, whereas females used bouts D more frequent. Sex and social context influenced only the structure of bouts A and B. The results showed that bouts A and B might be multi-component signals and non-redundant.

scholarly journals Individual behavioural traits not social context affects learning about novel objects in archerfish

2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Behavioural Phenotype ◽  
Social Species ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Animals ◽  
Novel Objects ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.

A Qualitative Study on Friends and the Social Context of Sexual Victimization: Implications for Campus-Based Interventions

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780122095427
Author(s):  
Jessica A. Blayney ◽  
Tiffany Jenzer ◽  
Jennifer P. Read ◽  
Jennifer Livingston ◽  
Maria Testa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Sexual Victimization ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Potential Danger ◽  
The Social ◽  
Barriers To Implementation ◽  
College Drinkers

Sexual victimization (SV) risk can begin in social contexts, ones where friends are present, though it is unclear how friends might be integrated into SV prevention. Using focus groups, female college drinkers described (a) the role of friends in preventing SV, (b) the strategies friends use to reduce vulnerability, and (c) the barriers to implementation. Friends-based strategies (keeping tabs on one another, using signals to convey potential danger, interrupting escalating situations, taking responsibility for friends, relying on male friends) and barriers (intoxication, preoccupation, situation ambiguity, social consequences) were discussed. Interventions can draw on these strategies, but must address the critical barriers.

Profiling “User Bases” of Online Social Contexts

2020 ◽  
pp. 113-126
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Current User ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Common Practices

One aspect of profiling to enhance teaching and learning involves the various contexts in which learners will engage, such as particular social media ecosystems and their attendant microcultures (the social norms and common practices in these spaces), particularly if learners will be engaging with individuals outside of the formal classroom. Understanding the larger online social context helps define the affordances and constraints of what can be effectively taught and learned. This involves profiling the current user base of the online social spaces where the learners will be engaging and interacting and co-creating knowledge.

Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the Rhetoric of Choice

1998 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pippa Brush
Keyword(s):  
Cosmetic Surgery ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Recent Theory ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Standards ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Economic Constraints

The metaphor of inscription on the body and the constitution of the body through those inscriptions have been widely used in recent attempts to theorize the body. Michel Foucault calls the body the ‘inscribed surface of events’ (Foucault, 1984: 83) and Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ‘female (or male) body can no longer be regarded as a fixed, concrete substance, a pre-cultural given. It has a determinate form only by being socially inscribed’ (Grosz, 1987: 2). The body becomes plastic, inscribed with gender and cultural standards. While Foucault assumes the existence of a pre-inscriptive body, many theorists reject that idea and argue that ‘there is no recourse to a body that has not always already been interpreted by cultural meanings’ (Butler, 1990: 8). The constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is indistinguishable. Starting from Catherine Belsey's suggestion that to ‘give the metaphor literal significance … is to … isolate it for contemplation’ (Belsey, 1988: 100), I discuss this metaphor of inscription, using cosmetic surgery as one literal example. While some theorists reject the pre-inscriptive body, the popular discourses advocating changing one's body assume unproblematically the existence of a body prior to these ‘elective’ procedures and reinforce the mind/body dualism which recent theory has sought so insistently to reject. I examine how popular discourses of body modification enforce a disciplinary regime (in Foucault's sense) and impose degrees of both literal and figurative inscription. Juxtaposing these two perspectives, I explore how both discourses efface the materiality of the body and the social contexts within which bodies are experienced and constructed. While the rhetoric surrounding cosmetic surgery denies the physical process and the economic constraints, so theories of the body which stress the body's plasticity also deny the materiality of that process and the cultural and social contexts within which the body is always placed.

scholarly journals Dialog Structure Through the Lens of Gender, Gender Environment, and Power

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-55
Author(s):  
Vinodkumar Prabhakaran ◽  
Owen Rambow
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Human Behavior ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Gender Information ◽  
The Social ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
Automatic Methods ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Textual Content

Understanding how the social context of an interaction affects our dialog behavior is of great interest to social scientists who study human behavior, as well as to computer scientists who build automatic methods to infer those social contexts. In this paper, we study the interaction of power, gender, and dialog behavior in organizational interactions. In order to perform this study, we first construct the Gender Identified Enron Corpus of emails, in which we semi-automatically assign the gender of around 23,000 individuals who authored around 97,000 email messages in the Enron corpus. This corpus, which is made freely available, is orders of magnitude larger than previously existing gender identified corpora in the email domain. Next, we use this corpus to perform a largescale data-oriented study of the interplay of gender and manifestations of power. We argue that, in addition to one’s own gender, the “gender environment” of an interaction, i.e., the gender makeup of one’s interlocutors, also affects the way power is manifested in dialog. We focus especially on manifestations of power in the dialog structure — both, in a shallow sense that disregards the textual content of messages (e.g., how often do the participants contribute, how often do they get replies etc.), as well as the structure that is expressed within the textual content (e.g., who issues requests and how are they made, whose requests get responses etc.). We find that both gender and gender environment affect the ways power is manifested in dialog, resulting in patterns that reveal the underlying factors. Finally, we show the utility of gender information in the problem of automatically predicting the direction of power between pairs of participants in email interactions.

scholarly journals Conversational Pragmatics: Memory Reporting Strategies in Different Social Contexts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatriz Martín-Luengo ◽  
Karlos Luna ◽  
Yury Shtyrov
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Incentive Structure ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
Incentive Structures ◽  
The Social ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
Different Levels

Conversational pragmatics studies, among others, factors that affect the information we share with others. Previous research showed that when participants are unsure about the correctness of an answer, they report fewer answers. This behavior strongly depends on the incentive structure of the social context where the question-response exchange takes place. In this research we studied how the different incentive structure of several types of social contexts affects conversational pragmatics and the amount of information we are willing to share. In addition, we also studied how different levels of knowledge may affect memory reporting in different social contexts. Participants answered easy, intermediate, and difficult general knowledge questions and decided whether they would report or withhold their selected answer in different social contexts: formal vs. informal, and constrained (a context that promotes providing only responses we are certain about) vs. loose (with an incentive structure that maximizes providing any type of answer). Overall, our results confirmed that social contexts are associated with a different incentive structure which affect memory reporting strategies, and that the effect of social contexts depended on the difficulty of the questions. Our results highlight the relevance of studying the different incentive structures of social contexts to understand the underlying processes of conversational pragmatics, and stress the importance of considering metamemory theories of memory reporting.

The Social Context

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lasana T. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Behavior ◽  
Sudden Death ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Social

The seventh chapter argues for the importance of the social context in continuing to influence whether social cognition is engaged or not, and describes a version of the delayed sudden death virus outbreak thought experiment without the death and virus components, set in modern society. This chapter then reviews classical social psychological studies that illustrate the power of the social context in shaping social cognition and resulting behaviour. It describes different types of social contexts, and explores the role of consistency motives in guiding human behaviour. Finally, it makes an appeal for a spectrum metaphor for social behavior, rather than alternative metaphors that categorise the phenomenon too narrowly.

Perceptions of Water Quality in First Nations Communities: Exploring the Role of Context

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Baird ◽  
Ryan Plummer ◽  
Diane Dupont ◽  
Blair Carter
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Drinking Water ◽  
Social Context ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Water Governance ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Adaptive Governance ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship

Drinking water quality problems are persistent and challenging for many of Canada's First Nations communities despite past and ongoing initiatives to improve the situation. These initiatives have often been employed without consideration for understanding the social context that is so critical for the development of appropriate water governance approaches. This article offers insights about the relationship between institutions for water governance and perceptions in three Ontario First Nations communities. Similarities among communities were particularly noticeable for gender where women valued water more highly and were less content with water quality. The findings presented here highlight potential impacts of displacement, gender, and water sources on perceptions of water quality and offer initial insights that indicate the need for further research to consider the potential for adaptive governance approaches that enhance fit between problem and social contexts.

Introduction

2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Genevieve Fisher ◽  
Diana DiPaolo Loren
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
The Body ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
The Social

This article provides a brief overview of recent archaeological literature about bodily constructions of identity. We introduce themes of embodiment, landscape, appearance, representation, and symbolism and discuss how presentations of the body are used to construct identities in social contexts. By focusing on the ways in which individuals create and experience themselves through their bodies, archaeologists are better able to comprehend them as culturally-specific, multiply-constituted social beings. The presentation of self can then be used to interpret the social and physical aspects (gender, race, religion, sexuality, age, etc.) that are key to the construction of identities in everyday life.

scholarly journals Exploring the Influence of Local Social Context on Strategies for Achieving Fire Adapted Communities

Fire ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis B. Paveglio ◽  
Catrin M. Edgeley ◽  
Matthew Carroll ◽  
Mark Billings ◽  
Amanda M. Stasiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Wildland Fire ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Wildfire Management ◽  
Management Planning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Officials ◽  
In Fire ◽  
Fire Adapted Communities

There is a growing recognition that the social diversity of communities at risk from wildland fire may necessitate divergent combinations of policies, programs and incentives that allow diverse populations to promote fire adapted communities (FACs). However, there have been few coordinated research efforts to explore the perceived utility and effectiveness of various options for FACs among residents, professionals, and local officials in disparate communities with different social contexts. The research presented here attempts to systematically explore the combination of local social factors that influence support for coordinated wildfire risk management across locations. We conducted 19 interactive focus groups across five communities spanning five Western U.S. states using a mixed-method design that allowed for the collection of quantitative and qualitative data. Results indicate a number of significant differences in effectiveness ratings for adaptation approaches across communities, including requirement of vegetation mitigations on private properties, fostering Firewise communities, and zoning efforts in fire-prone areas. We used qualitative data to help explain the differences between communities as a function of unique local social context operating in each location. We also compare our results with existing frameworks promoting community “archetypes” to evaluate their continued use in wildfire management planning or response.

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