The articles in this theme issue seek to understand the evolutionary bases of social learning and the consequences of cultural transmission for the evolution of human behaviour. In this introductory article, we provide a summary of these articles (seven articles on the experimental exploration of cultural transmission and three articles on the role of gene-culture coevolution in shaping human b...

Background: Since the general distrust of a new technology is an important obstacle in the development of this technology, attention to the ethical and social aspects of emerging technologies can play an important role in the development of these technologies. The present study uses documentary and library studies to examine the social and ethical aspects of new technologies with a focus on nan...

It is often assumed in experiments and models that social learning abilities - how often individuals copy others, plus who and how they copy - are species-typical. Yet there is accruing evidence for systematic individual variation in social learning within species. Here we review evidence for this individual variation, placing it within a continuum of increasing phenotypic plasticity, from gene...

Social smiling is universally regarded as being an infant's first facial expression of pleasure. Underlying co-constructivist emotion theories are the assumptions that the emergence of social smiling is bound to experiences of face-to-face interactions with caregivers and the impact of two developmental mechanisms--maternal and infant imitation. We analyzed mother-infant interactions from two d...

One of the essential consequences in the emergence of consumer society is that individuals' body hasbecome reflective based on changing their visible characteristics of their bodies. People try to construct a social body acceptable to their society. The present article is a survey research that intends to explore the social factors affecting body management. Statistical population of this study...

308 © 2015 Guilford Publications, Inc. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Humboldt Foundation (Oyserman) and from the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School (Mourey) and the helpful comments we received from Norbert Schwarz, Michigan’s Culture and Self Lab group, and from participants in research seminars and colloquia at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Robert Wye...

Anthropologists have become increasingly interested in embodiment-that is, the ways that socio-cultural factors influence the form, behavior and subjective experience of human bodies. At the same time, social cognitive neuroscience has begun to reveal the mechanisms of embodiment by investigating the neural underpinnings and consequences of social experience. Despite this overlap, the two field...