This paper summarizes analyses of the structure and function of 775 presentation sequences obtained during 603 h of observation on two groups of Amboseli baboons (Papio cynocephalus). Hindquarter presentations among Amboseli baboons could in most cases be unambiguously assigned to one of six categories Submissive, Sexual, Mixed Sexual-Submissive, Affiliative, Abbreviated and Grooming based on a...

This study explores the associations between shame, depression and social anxiety from the perspective of social rank theory (Price and Sloman, 1987; Gilbert, 1989, 1992). Social rank theory argues that emotions and moods are significantly influenced by the perceptions of one’s social status/rank; that is the degree to which one feels inferior to others and looked down on. A common outcome of s...

Disturbed social interaction is seen in many psychiatric and neurological disorders. The majority of animal models used in the pharmaceutical industry, however, do not allow assessment of social behaviors. This may due to the beliefs that measuring social behavior is too labor intensive, lacks robustness, or is too complicated to measure. Here, we describe two models of social domination: Domin...

Dominance and submissiveness are important functional elements of the social hierarchy. By employing selective breeding based on a social interaction test, we developed mice with strong and stable, inheritable features of dominance and submissiveness. In order to identify candidate genes responsible for dominant and submissive behavior, we applied transcriptomic and proteomic studies supported ...

Previous research has revealed that feelings of anger are typically accompanied by the goal to approach the emotion-evoking stimulus and feelings of fear by the goal to avoid the emotionevoking stimulus. We set up an experiment to investigate the boundary conditions of this set of relations. We hypothesized that anger is related to approach and fear to avoidance when approach serves the goal to...

There are striking differences in the behavioral response to social defeat between male and female Syrian hamsters. Whereas males exhibit a prolonged behavioral response to defeat (i.e., conditioned defeat), many females remain aggressive or show only a transient submissive response following defeat. The current study tested the hypothesis that sex steroids underlie this differential behavioral...

Two studies examine complementarity (vs. mimicry) of dominant and submissive nonverbal behaviors. In the first study, participants interacted with a confederate who displayed either dominance (through postural expansion) or submission (through postural constriction). On average, participants exposed to a dominant confederate decreased their postural stance, whereas participants exposed to a sub...

Social interactions are multifaceted, composed of interlinked sensorymotor behaviors. The individual significance of each of these correlated components cannot be established without observing the full behavior. Recently, Wesson [1] concluded that rats display their submissive status by lowering sniff rate following face-to-face encounters with a dominant conspecific. How rats can perceive such...