Using Adaptive Interaction to Simplify Caregiver’s Communication with People with Dementia Who Cannot Speak

Caregivers find it difficult to interact with people with dementia who have lost the capacity for speech. Adaptive Interaction is a simplified approach that uses the nonverbal fundamentals of communication to connect with people who can no longer speak. Here we present Adaptive Interaction as a method for equipping caregivers with these nonverbal skills to increase communication with the people they care for. Six caregivers were each paired with one individual with dementia and trained in Adaptive Interaction. After receiving training in Adaptive Interaction, caregivers identified more communicative behaviours in their interactions partners and engaged in more frequent positive social behaviours and meaningful actions during interactions. These findings suggest that it is possible to equip staff to use simplified communication based on nonverbal fundamentals to connect with people with dementia who can no longer speak.

Entrenching Community (Participatory) Governance Through Street Committees at Cato Crest, eThekwini Municipality

This chapter explores the role of street committees in retrenching and grounding community participatory governance at Cato Crest. The chapter is purposed to revitalise street committees as street/area democratically elected and managed structures aimed at restoring inclusive local democracy, peace, and order, especially in the prevalence of domestic violence, crime, community disunity and divisions, disobedient youth, and other anti-social behaviours. The author argues that the current configuration of street committees as partisan structures compromises their fundamental purpose of uniting people regardless of race, culture, gender, and socio-economic class. The chapter found that without clear developmental roles, street committees are often highjacked to serve a party political agenda. The chapter is qualitative in nature when data were collected through observation and face-to-face interviews with street committees at Cato Crest. The empirical data was also enriched by secondary sources in the form of journal papers, books, and government reports.

Góry — dom dla zwierząt czy schronisko dla ludzi?

When thinking about nature, it is impossible to overlook fauna, which contributes to its constant transformation, mainly through the development of new species. The author of the article sheds light on the current situation of animals living e.g. in national parks, focusing on pro-environmental activities on social media and non-virtual media, and on destructive human behaviour. The growing tourism- and economy-related infrastructurisation of the mountains as well as their increasingly frequent exploration by humans force animals to change their familiar habitats. Owing to the animals’ natural territorialism as well as instinctive fight for species survival, in the case of stronger specimens we often see altruistic actions to protect the group under threat. The interference of humans with the natural environment forces animals to acquire social behaviours which are a consequence of a long adaptation process. The author of the article also examines selected aspects of ethology, that is study of inherited and acquired animal behaviour. However, the appropriation of the mountains by humans and their adaptation to human needs are characterised by a relatively high awareness of the impact on animal life, a fact reflected in numerous ecological and faunistic campaigns seeking to protect natural habitats and their indigenous residents. The article also features an analysis of campaigns and projects that are to make people sensitive to the fact that they are guests at a home of species other than the human species.

A preference to learn from successful rather than common behaviours in human social dilemmas

Human cooperation is often claimed to be special and requiring explanations based on gene–culture coevolution favouring a desire to copy common social behaviours. If this is true, then individuals should be motivated to both observe and copy common social behaviours. Previous economic experiments, using the public goods game, have suggested individuals' desire to sacrifice for the common good and to copy common social behaviours. However, previous experiments have often not shown examples of success. Here we test, on 489 participants, whether individuals are more motivated to learn about, and more likely to copy, either common or successful behaviours. Using the same social dilemma and standard instructions, we find that individuals were primarily motivated to learn from successful rather than common behaviours. Consequently, social learning disfavoured costly cooperation, even when individuals could observe a stable, pro-social level of cooperation. Our results call into question explanations for human cooperation based on cultural evolution and/or a desire to conform with common social behaviours. Instead, our results indicate that participants were motivated by personal gain, but initially confused, despite receiving standard instructions. When individuals could learn from success, they learned to cooperate less, suggesting that human cooperation is maybe not so special after all.

Adult retrospective report of child abuse and prospective indicators of childhood harm: a population birth cohort study

Background We aim to determine whether adult retrospective report of child abuse is associated with greater risk of prospectively assessed harmful environments in childhood. We assessed possible recall basis by adult depression status. Methods At 45 years, participants of the 1958 British birth cohort (N = 9308) reported a range of abuse types (by 16 years). Prospective data, ages 7–16 years, were obtained for impoverished upbringing, hazardous conditions, anti-social behaviours and 16 years poor parent-child relationships. We estimated associations between retrospective report of child abuse and prospectively measured harm using (i) odds ratios (ORs, 95% confidence intervals) and (ii) positive predictive values (PPVs). PPVs were calculated stratified by adult depression status. Results Prevalence of retrospectively reported abuse ranged from 10.7% (psychological) to 1.60% (sexual) and 14.8% reported ≥ 1 type; prospectively recorded harm ranged from 10% (hazardous conditions/poor parent-child relationships) to 20% (anti-social behaviours). Adults retrospectively reporting abuse were more likely to have had harmful childhood environments: 52.4% had ≥ 1 indicator of harm (vs. 35.6% among others); ORsex-adjusted for poor relationships with parents was 2.98 (2.50, 3.54). For retrospectively reported (vs. none) abuse, there was a trend of increasing relative risk ratio with number of harms, from 1.75 (1.50, 2.03) for 1 to 4.68 (3.39, 6.45) for 3/4 childhood harms. The PPV of ≥ 1 prospectively recorded harm did not differ between depressed (0.58 (0.52, 0.64)) and non-depressed (0.58 (0.55, 0.61)) groups. Conclusions In a population cohort, adult retrospective report of child abuse was associated with several harms, prospectively measured from childhood to adolescence, providing support for the validity of retrospective report-based research. Findings suggest retrospectively reported child abuse is not biased by depression in adulthood.

The red-beard evolutionary explanation of human sociality

Recent evolutionary studies on cooperation devote specific attention to non-verbal expressions of emotions. In this paper, I examine Robert Frank’s popular attempt to explain emotions, non-verbal markers and social behaviours. Following this line of work, I focus on the green-beard explanation of social behaviours. In response to the criticisms raised against this controversial ultimate explanation, based on resources found in Frank’s work, I propose an alternative red-beard explanation of human sociality. The red-beard explanation explains the emergence and evolution of emotions, a proximate cause, rather than patterns of behaviour. In contrast to simple evolutionary models that invoke a green-beard mechanism, I demonstrate that the red-beard explanation can be evolutionary stable. Social emotions are a common cause of a social behaviour and a phenotypic marker and therefore cooperative behaviour cannot be suppressed without also changing the marker.

One Health Approaches to Trace Mycobacterium leprae’s Zoonotic Potential Through Time

Hansen’s disease (leprosy), mainly caused by infection with Mycobacterium leprae, has accompanied humanity for thousands of years. Although currently rare in Europe, there are over 200,000 new infections annually in South East Asia, Africa, and South America. Over the years many disciplines – palaeopathology, ancient DNA and other ancient biomolecules, and history – have contributed to a better understanding of leprosy’s past, in particular its history in medieval Europe. We discuss their contributions and potential, especially in relation to the role of inter-species transmission, an unexplored phenomenon in the disease’s history. Here, we explore the potential of interdisciplinary approaches that understand disease as a biosocial phenomenon, which is a product of both infection with M. leprae and social behaviours that facilitate transmission and spread. Genetic evidence of M. leprae isolated from archaeological remains combined with systematic zooarchaeological and historical analysis would not only identify when and in what direction transmission occurred, but also key social behaviours and motivations that brought species together. In our opinion, this combination is crucial to understand the disease’s zoonotic past and current potential.

Markerless mouse tracking for social experiments

Automated behavior quantification requires accurate tracking of animals. Simultaneous tracking of multiple animals, particularly those lacking visual identifiers, is particularly challenging. Here we propose a markerless video-based tool to simultaneously track two socially interacting mice of the same color. It incorporates conventional handcrafted tracking and deep learning based techniques, which are trained on a small number of labeled images from a very basic, uncluttered experimental setup. The output consists of body masks and coordinates of the snout and tail-base for each mouse. The method was tested on a series of cross-setup videos recorded under commonly used experimental conditions including bedding in the cage and fiberoptic or headstage implants on the mice. Results obtained without any human intervention showed the effectiveness of the proposed approach, evidenced by a near elimination of identities switches and a 10% improvement in tracking accuracy. This suggests that the hybrid approach could be valuable for studying group behaviors, such as social interaction. This novel approach addresses problems of mistaken identities and lost information on key anatomical features that are common in existing methods. Finally, we demonstrated an application of this approach in studies of social behaviour of mice, by using it to quantify and compare interactions between pairs of mice in which some are anosmic, i.e. unable to smell. Our results indicated loss of olfaction impaired typical snout-directed social recognition behaviors of mice, while non-snout-directed social behaviours were enhanced.