Despite being a pan-cultural phenomenon, laughter is arguably the least understood behaviour deployed in social interaction. As well as being a response to humour, it has other important functions including promoting social affiliation, developing cooperation and regulating competitive behaviours. This multi-functional feature of laughter marks it as an adaptive behaviour central to facilitatin...

BACKGROUND Researchers are required to seek consent from Indigenous communities prior to conducting research but there is inadequate information about how Indigenous people understand and become fully engaged with this consent process. Few studies evaluate the preference or understanding of the consent process for research with Indigenous populations. Lack of informed consent can impact on rese...

Background A study of disability among the indigenous Sami people in Norway presented a number of ethical and methodological challenges rarely addressed in the literature. Objectives The main study was designed to examine and understand the everyday life, transitions between life stages and democratic participation of Norwegian Sami people experiencing disability. Hence, the purpose of this art...

Increasingly, communities and organisations around the world are realising the value and significance of Indigenous Knowledge and the importance of preserving it for future generations. Indigenous Knowledge Centres (IKCs) are being established globally, but particularly in Australia, Africa, Latin America and Asia. The capture and preservation of Indigenous Knowledge is being used to revitalise...

Focus particles interact with the focused constituent in a sentence. The particle only presents a challenge to formalizing this relationship as while it commonly precedes the focused constituent, only can also follow it. A syntactic account of these constructions is presented that captures the unique properties of only’s distribution within the framework presented in Kayne (1998) and offers sup...

Anthropogenic activities, including the intentional releases of fish for enhancing populations (stocking), are recognized as adversely impacting the adaptive potential of wild populations. Here, the genetic characteristics of European barbel Barbus barbus were investigated using 18 populations in England, where it is indigenous to eastern-flowing rivers and where stocking has been used to enhan...

Family and cultural inclusion are essential for the healthy development of young Australian Indigenous peoples with low cognitive ability. To date, this issue has received limited research attention. A secondary analysis of data collected in Wave 4 of Footprints in Time, Australia's Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children, was conducted to help address this research gap. The study results ind...