New paper! Being more facially expressive has social network benefits, especially in women. May explain why highly expressive faces have evolved in humans! www.cell.com/iscience/ful... With @bridgetwaller.bsky.social @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social Alisa Balabanova, Robin Dunbar and Jasmine Rollings

Spontaneous facial expressivity predicts real-world social network size and richness

Psychology; Social interaction; Social sciences

cell.com

🐒 Post-doc Opportunity 🐒 ... annndd we're now also advertising a 3-year Research Fellow position at NTU as part of our @leverhulme.ac.uk funded project. More info: jamiewhitehouse.github.io/mappingconne... Apply here: vacancies.ntu.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai... Deadline: 19th June :) Please repost!

🎉 Big milestone! Over the last two years, with the incredible support of so many wonderful families, we’ve recorded nearly 38 million headcam video frames, capturing young children’s everyday experiences. www.youtube.com/shorts/dsF4Z...

Baby headcams reveal how babies encounter faces during development

YouTube video by Cardiff Babylab

youtube.com

One more month to apply for this! Please forward to any potential students (UK-only)

Eithne Kavanagh@eithnekavanagh.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Interested in the evolution of social behaviour? We have a fully-funded PhD opportunity on human social hierarchies, nonverbal behaviour and health! Supervised by myself, @bridgetwaller.bsky.social and @ellamcloughlin.bsky.social. Informal enquires encouraged! www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Interested in the evolution of social behaviour? We have a fully-funded PhD opportunity on human social hierarchies, nonverbal behaviour and health! Supervised by myself, @bridgetwaller.bsky.social and @ellamcloughlin.bsky.social. Informal enquires encouraged! www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts

Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.

ntu.ac.uk

BBS article on mechanisms of group cohesion in primates (Robin Dunbar), with our commentary proposing facial expression as one of those key mechanisms! @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Fully-funded PhD position with Yuri Kawaguchi at NTU, associated with her BBSRC Fellowship on parenting in rhesus macaques. Join us! @yurikawaguchi.bsky.social @ntupsychology.bsky.social (note - open to UK students only) www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Enhancing welfare through cognitive assessment of parenting skills in captive managed animals

Find out more about this PhD opportunity funded by BBSRC, hosted through the NTU fully funded studentship scheme.

ntu.ac.uk

Interested in the evolution of social behaviour? We have a fully-funded PhD opportunity on human social hierarchies, nonverbal behaviour and health! Supervised by myself, @bridgetwaller.bsky.social and @ellamcloughlin.bsky.social. Informal enquires encouraged! www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts

Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.

ntu.ac.uk

Fully funded PhD studentship on human dominance hierarchies and non-verbal behaviour, with lead Eithne Kavanagh. Join us at NTU! @eithnekavanagh.bsky.social www.ntu.ac.uk/study-and-co...

Physiological health outcomes of dominance hierarchies in team-based contexts

Find out more about this fully funded PhD studentship opportunity.

ntu.ac.uk

I'm very excited to share the central paper from my PhD out now in Science Advances. We investigated how social effects among neighbors shape the evolution of reproductive cooperation and the pace of adaptive population growth among the Indigenous Tsimane of Bolivia. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Indirect genetic effects among neighbors promote cooperation and accelerate adaptation in a small-scale human society

Social effects on fertility promote population growth and the evolution of flexible cooperation in a small-scale human society.

science.org

@bridgetwaller.bsky.social www.researchgate.net/publication/...

(PDF) Faking It Isn’t Making It: Research Needs Spontaneous and Naturalistic Facial Expressions

PDF | Facial expressions play a pivotal role in shaping social interactions. However, the conceptualization of facial expressions as direct readouts of... | Find, read and cite all the research you ne...

researchgate.net

Our #study finds that #male #dominance isn't the norm among #primates, and starts to unravel what shapes flexibility in intersexual power paper (OA) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500405122 press release https://www.mpg.de/24986976/0630-evan-beyond-the-alpha-male-150495-x?c=2249

We are looking for a Research Assistant to contribute to our ongoing analysis of dolphin acoustic data from West Wales - collaboration between @wtsww.bsky.social @bristolbiosci.bsky.social 🐬 Deadline is 29th June - please share widely! www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

New paper alert 👇 We present a new two-action sequential coordination task designed to investigate co-representation non-human primates. In collaboration with @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social and Josep Call and out now, fully #openaccess in PLoS One! (1/4) journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Do chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) mentally represent collaboration?: Action-learning and communication in a partnered task

Non-human primates engage in complex collective behaviours, but existing research does not paint a clear picture of what individuals cognitively represent when they act together. This study investigat...

journals.plos.org

Interested in biology and comparative psychology, and working in an interdisciplinary project and research team? I’m advertising two PhD positions on the evolutionary origins of cooperative sociality and communication (start 1.10.) at the University of Konstanz👇 links below!

We asked how behavioral diversity & agonistic behaviors relate to group size in wild capuchins. We analyzed >65,000 behavioral scans collected over 15 yrs on 214 capuchins (8 groups) & controlled for # inds sampled. We found behavioral richness, diversity & agonism was higher in larger groups.

Alisa Balabanova runner up in the student talk prize at EHBEA for her talk on facial expressivity and popularity! Well done Alisa! @ehbea2025.bsky.social @ntupsychology.bsky.social

CE Job Alert 🚨 - 2 year postdoc at LSE to develop empirically informed models of reputation dynamics on evolving social networks, as part of Leverhulme project on Reputation and the Reproduction of Social Inequality. culturalevolutionsociety.org/jobs/two-yea...

🚨New in @science.org🚨 With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication

Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos

Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum ...

science.org

Have you every found yourself wondering whether the most widely used measures of social cognitive ability measure what they are supposed to measure?

We’re recruiting for 5 faculty positions in cognitive neuroscience, psychology & animal neuroscience! Exciting science going on @UofG, Glasgow is an amazing and green city with the friendliest people, and you’ll have the stunning highlands on your doorstep! tinyurl.com/mbn6yf56 Please repost!

Professor, Senior Lecturer/Lecturer and Lecturer posts - Glasgow City (GB) job with University of Glasgow | 12838283

University of Glasgow College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences  School of Psychology & Neuroscience Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience/Psy...

tinyurl.com

🐳 UPCOMING BOOK ALERT 🐬 The Evolution of Cetacean Societies Edited by @darrencroft.bsky.social @andrewfoote.bsky.social @ellengarland.bsky.social and myself Preorder available now press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... #whale #dolphin #animalbehaviour

@mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social are seeking a PhD candidate in the field of psychology focusing on self-awareness in nonhuman great apes drawing from different methods such as touch screens experiments, playback experiments, eye tracking, and behavioural experiments www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit...

Positions available - Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

eva.mpg.de

New paper from Olivia O'Callaghan's PhD on ERC project FACEDIFF www.facediff.co.uk, macaque facial expression processing gets better with age and good maternal care, so more flex than previously thought? @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @ntupsychology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.is...

Maternal care predicts facial expression processing in macaques

Facial expressions are common across mammals and are essential for social communication. In humans, a rich early social environment is important for t…

sciencedirect.com

New paper on macaque facial muscles with @clarekimock.bsky.social @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social and others! Macaques don’t show the same extreme variability in facial musculature as humans… anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

1/3 Tutorial on exploring ecological momentary assessment data is online at AMPPS, with: - Accessible ways to visualize data for better understanding - Models to get some first insights - Further reading boxes for more advanced topics - Reproducible pipeline you can run over your own data

So exciting to see MacaqueNet out into the world! 🤩 Learn about our global community & database centralizing standardized affiliative & agonistic data from 61 populations across 14 macaque species: doi/10.1111/1365... Explore >600 networks & request data: macaquenet.github.io/database/

MacaqueNet: Advancing comparative behavioural research through large‐scale collaboration

We present MacaqueNet, a global community of macaque researchers who developed the first publicly searchable, standardised database on affiliative and agonistic behaviour. This cross-species database...

besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Read about our research on the social bonding function of facial expressivity, here in our Scientific American article! www.scientificamerican.com/article/expr... @jamiewhitehouse.bsky.social @bridgetwaller.bsky.social

Expressive Faces Make People More Likable

Facial expressions do far more than just broadcast emotions

scientificamerican.com

New paper! 🐒 🧪 We found the Kinda baboons have long-lasting female-male relationships that are largely male-driven and persist across female reproductive states. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...