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This chapter reviews pathological altruism in the context of social biology. In particular, the focus is on the biology that may underlie a “seduction super-responder”—that is, a person who is highly reactive to social persuasion, as well as a “hyper-truster—one who misplaces trust as a result of failing to adequately detect social signals. Oxytocin, vasopressin, CD38, and related molecules are explored in this context. Group behaviors, as for example emotional contagion, are discussed in the context of autonomic reactions. Pathological altruism may be viewed as a distorted, and possibly co-opted, response to social signals based, at least in part, on biology.

This chapter discusses recent findings from research on face and body perception giving special attention to the implications of the findings for social vision. The first section is devoted to similarities between the processes underlying face and body perception. The second section discusses how the perception of faces and bodies is integrated. The third section tackles issues on conscious and nonconscious perception of socially meaningful signals and their neuroanatomical underpinnings. Finally, the relation between social vision and awareness is explored, and notion of social consciousness is developed. Throughout the chapter, the notions of agent vision and social vision are used in the sense made familiar by the expression “night vision” to refer to various devices that expand the normal visual abilities and allows the observer to see in the dark, outside the spotlight of consciousness.

This chapter reports a study that selects a sample of smiles on the basis of the best substantiated marker of enjoyment (Duchenne's) and determines whether such smiles also showed the limited duration marker. The data are consistent with the proposal that smiles with the Duchenne marker act more like emotional facial actions. Another study addressed the question of whether the subtle markers of enjoyment can operate as social signals. Although the second study has shown that observers can distinguish enjoyment from nonenjoyment smiles, it does not tell whether each type of smile conveys different information about the emotional state of the person when observers' attention is not focused on just the smile; this was examined in Study 3. It showed that subjects in the solitary situation were rated as generally less positive than subjects in the social interaction condition. In general, the results of these studies demonstrate that there are not only multiple physical differences between enjoyment smiles and nonenjoyment smiles, but also that these differences are observable and influence subjective impressions. Some thoughts on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), dynamic markers of emotion, and baseball are discussed.

This chapter describes how human impacts alter animal communication. It addresses the ecological and evolutionary consequences of altered animal communication, and emphasizes on their effects in animal behaviour. It investigates how animals utilize social signals in performing daily tasks, and examines the influence of anthropogenic communication disturbance regarding survival patterns, change in the magnitude and direction of natural and sexual selection, and impingement of basic evolutionary processes like reproductive isolation and hybridization. It looks into some of the processes of disturbance that reduces the efficacy of communication such as weakening the signal production, distorting or attenuating signals as they travel to the receiver, or hampering perception. It also highlights certain environmental changes that can modify distribution of signals.

This chapter addresses the political dimensions of peace. What are the processes that generate and maintain peace within every political community? And what are the processes—economic, diplomatic/political, cultural, ideological—that maintain peace between allied communities (or even, for that matter, between communities linked in cold war relations)? The chapter focuses on small-scale societies, documenting in ethnographic detail the working of a “social signaling” system, a mechanism for managing internal conflict within and among allied political communities. Its ethnographic reference is the Yangoru Boiken of Papua New Guinea, among whom the author has conducted some two years' worth of fieldwork. It considers the role that competitive pig-exchange played in transforming potentially lethal conflicts over land-tenure into nonviolent, symbolic conflicts, thereby maintaining the peace and integrity of political communities and alliances of these communities.

This book consists primarily of research and review chapters on face perception published during the previous twelve years. This chapter explains the basics of the approach, points out why the investigation of the particular questions selected has been done, looks at some of the key points which emerge, and picks up their implications. These include broad issues, such as the extent to which individuals' mental lives result from the operation of discrete components devoted to different purposes, and the differences between conscious and nonconscious processes. Because of the variety of social signals read from the face, it aims to offer unique insights into some of these questions. Furthermore, in order to provide an indication of where things are going, some recent findings are also incorporated in this chapter.

This chapter examines the problem of lexical content given a context. It uses the notion of focal points to develop a system of social coordination of reference. It argues that these focal points are conventionalized, via social practice, into the concepts associated with lexical items. The process of conventionalizing these focal points has an economic and ecological character whose logic can be formalized, understood, and tested empirically. The resulting system gives insight into the difference between homophony, when two unrelated meanings are associated with the same phonological sign; and polysemy, where a single form extends its hegemony over a semantic space. The chapter ends with some thoughts on how to simulate such a system; the resulting approach takes meaning to be an emergent property of social signaling.

This chapter considers the impact of context information on the perception of emotions. Different types of context are discussed and the limits of the influence of context information for the perception of emotion expressions and the inferences drawn from them are delineated. A model of the meaning of emotion expressions in context (MEEC) is introduced, which proposes a pertinent but not exclusive role for context information by proposing core appraisals as the limiting frame of reinterpretation. The model, just as do social constructivist accounts, considers perceivers as active participants in the emotion decoding process—but as ones who are limited with regard to their constructive freedom.

This chapter examines the ability of Micronesians to decipher the unspoken, to read social situations based on body language and facial gestures. Bragging or overt self-aggrandizement is always in bad taste in the islands. An individual is expected to let his deeds speak for themselves. Even when one is praised for what he has done, he is expected to dismiss the achievements as too ordinary to warrant such praise. This chapter considers how Micronesian islanders interpret silences and the pauses in speech, how they speak to the person rather than about the particular matter at hand, their strong aversion to offending anyone, and their tendency to adopt a slow and noncommittal approach that allows them time to survey the social terrain so that they can avoid pitfalls. It shows that Micronesians can pick up social signals without the need for verbal expression, can communicate emotional signals of their own without resorting to words, and have an instinct for sensing approval or disapproval even when this may not be overtly expressed.

In this chapter, a pig wins the Kentucky Derby; people remember bugs and beasts; and monkeys take flight. But mainly we consider memories that evolved in anthropoids. As these ancestors evolved from small animals into larger ones, they needed to travel long distances to obtain food. They used high-power vision and a new kind of color perception to detect distant sights indicating ripe fruit. The memory of these perceptions helped guide their choices toward the most valuable food items both near and far. The sounds made by boisterous, feeding birds provided similar information. Other new memories involved representations of quantities, such as the number of food items and their distance. Eventually, the new memories evolved by anthropoids also helped them recognize and communicate with members of their social group.

Anthropoid primates enhanced stereoscopic vision and combined it with adaptations for diurnal foraging, including a fovea and full-color vision. Along with these developments, the posterior parietal and temporal areas of early primates elaborated into the feature memory system. The parietal parts of this system specialized in representing the metrics of resources, such as their distances and quantities; the temporal parts specialized in representing the visual and acoustic signs of resources, especially at a distance. In addition to anthropoid innovations, the feature system incorporated sensory areas that had evolved in early mammals, such as the perirhinal and primary visual cortex, as well as posterior parietal and temporal areas that had emerged in early primates. The anthropoid feature system functions in conjunction with the navigation system as neural substrates for the perceptions and memories that guide distance foraging.