It is the first study which tries to explore the influence of interpersonal competition on subordinate job status in the workplace. Interpersonal competition is defined as rent-seeking behavior (RSB) in this research. We also examine the influence of interpersonal relationships, known as Guanxi in Chinese society, on subordinate job status in the workplace. Finally, this study combines RSB with...

Object categorization processes were investigated by measuring event-related potentials while subjects categorized objects at the superordinate (e.g. animal), basic (e.g. dog) and subordinate (e.g. beagle) levels of abstraction. An enhanced negative deflection (N1) was found at posterior recording sites for subordinate level categorizations compared with basic level categorizations and was inte...

Intracolonial conflict among ant workers can establish a reproductive hierarchy, with top-ranking individuals often securing oviposition opportunities. Here we show that in the ant Odontomachus brunneus, reproduction-based dominance interactions control worker movement and location, and that this, in turn, mechanistically governs task allocation within the colony and establishes a division of l...

These experiments test the hypothesis that preschool children are predisposed to interpret nouns as referring to taxonomic relations, and that this bias guides the early establishment of conceptual hierarchies (e.g., collie, dog, mamma/, aima/). Two familiar hierarchies-animals and food-and two linguistic form classesnouns and adjectives-were examined in detail. Experiment 1 tested the effect o...

Neuropeptides modulate many aspects of behavior and physiology in a broad range of animals. Arginine vasotocin (AVT) is implicated in mediating social behavior in teleost fish, although its specific role varies between species, sexes, life stages, and social context. To investigate whether the effects of AVT on behavior depend on social context, we used the African cichlid fish Astatotilapia bu...

In male vertebrates, two conflicting paradigms--the energetic costs of high dominance rank and the chronic stress of low rank--have been proposed to explain patterns of immune function and parasitism. To date, neither paradigm has provided a complete explanation for status-related differences in male health. Here, we applied meta-analyses to test for correlations between male social status, imm...

This study examines the kinds of shape features that mediate basic- and subordinate-level object recognition. Observers were trained to categorize sets of novel objects at either a basic (between-families) or subordinate (within-family) level of classification. We analyzed the spatial distributions of fixations and compared them to model distributions of different curvature polarity (regions of...