A new study has found that, when a macaque monkey chooses where to look, activity in parietal cortex reflects anticipated reward value, whether from fluid to drink or from social information such as dominance.

Events in an online social network can be categorized roughly into endogenous events, where users just respond to the actions of their neighbors within the network, or exogenous events, where users take actions due to drives external to the network. How much external drive should be provided to each user, such that the network activity can be steered towards a target state? In this paper, we mo...

A large variety of complex systems in ecology, climate science, biomedicine and engineering have been observed to exhibit tipping points, where the internal dynamical state of the system abruptly changes. For example, such critical transitions may result in the sudden change of ecological environments and climate conditions. Data and models suggest that some of these drastic events may be prece...

BACKGROUND Despite the importance of social support in promoting physical activity, little is known about the relative influence of the type or source of social support on adolescent girls' physical activity and sedentary behaviors. This study examined the associations of two types of social support (social participation in and social encouragement for physical activity) and two social support ...

Social anxiety--the fear of social embarrassment and negative evaluation by others--ranks among people's worst fears, and it is often thought to impair task performance. We investigated the neurocognitive processes through which trait social anxiety relates to task performance, proposing a model of the joint contributions of reactive control, theoretically associated with conflict monitoring an...

The current research explored the neural mechanisms linking social status to perceptions of the social world. Two fMRI studies provide converging evidence that individuals lower in social status are more likely to engage neural circuitry often involved in ‘mentalizing’ or thinking about others’ thoughts and feelings. Study 1 found that college students’ perception of their social status in the ...

Social media check-in services have enabled people to share their activity-related choices, providing a new source of human activity and social networks data. Geolocation data from these services offer us information, in new ways, to understand social influence on individual choices. In this paper, we investigate the extent of social influence on individual activity and lifestyle choices from s...

OBJECTIVES Social support for physical activity is reliably associated with regular physical activity, however the social cognitive processes, particularly post-intentional processes, that can explain this link have not been well characterized. In this study, we examined the extent to which the relationship between social support for physical activity and subsequent physical activity can be acc...

This study examined whether controlling for social desirability improved the association between self-reported and objectively measured physical activity among adolescent males and the extent that psychosocial variables predict physical activity after controlling for social desirability. Participants (n=447) were 10- to 14-year old Houston Boy Scouts. Participants completed self-reports of phys...

Social networks, which emerged due to the rapid development of modern telecommunications and information technologies that led to the emergence of the Internet, can be viewed as a phenomenon of the information society. In a short time, there has been both quantitative and qualitative growth of social networks, which have become a common phenomenon in our life and the dominant way of communicati...